LIBRARY 

•'e:achers  colleoE 

8A«i3ARA.    CALIFORNIA 


THE   CRITICAL   GAME 


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THE  CRITICAL 
GAME 


JOHN  MACY 

Author  of  "The  Spirit  of  American  Literature,"'  etc. 


BONI  AND  LIVERIGHT 
Publishers  New  York 


Copyright.  1922,  by 

BoNi  AND  LiVERIGHT,   InC, 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America. 


STATE  TEA-HGH^  -oRNl* 

S>,NTA   BARBARA.  CAU 


1> 


To 
ROGER  IRVING   LEE 


CONTENTS 

Page 

The  Critical  Game 1 1 

Dante  in  English 31 

Dante's  Political  Philosophy 43 

Nietzsche    55 

Tolstoy 65 

Maeterlinck's  Essays 95 

Joseph  Conrad 105 

A  Conrad  Miscellany 123 

Strindberg 135 

Tagore 145 

Remy  de  Gourmont i53 

Swift's  Relations  with  Women 163 

William  James,  Man  of  Letters i75 

Biographies  of  Poe i93 

Biographies  of  Whitman 203 

George  E.  Woodberry 215 

Abraham  Cahan 227 

Thomas  Hardy 237 

George  Borrow 247 

Shelley 259 

H.  G.  Wells  and  Utopia 269 

John  Masefield   279 

Shakespeare  and  the  Scribes 289 

George  Moore  and  Other  Irish  Writers.  305 

James  Joyce  317 

D.  H.  Lawrence 325 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 


LIBBAPV 

«TATF  TF.ACHERS   COLLEOt 
ANTA    BARBARA.   CAU 


BANT 


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THE  CRITICAL  GAME. 

Criticism  is  one  form  of  the  game  of  writ- 
ing. It  differs  from  other  forms  only  as  whist 
differs  from  poker  and  as  tennis  differs  from 
golf.  The  motives  are  the  same,  the  exercise 
of  the  player's  brain  and  muscles,  and  the  enter- 
tainment of  the  spectators,  from  whom,  if  the 
player  be  successful,  he  derives  profit,  liveli- 
hood, applause,  and  fame.  The  function  of 
criticism  at  the  present  time,  and  at  all  times, 
is  the  function  of  all  literature,  to  be  wise,  witty, 
eloquent,  instructive,  humourous,  original,  grace- 
ful, beautiful,  provocative,  irritating,  persua- 
sive. That  is,  it  must  possess  some  of  the  many 
merits  that  can  be  found  in  any  type  of  litera- 
ture; it  must  in  some  way  be  good  writing. 
There  is  no  other  sound  principle  to  be  dis- 
covered in  the  treatises  on  the  art  of  criticism 
or  in  fine  examples  of  the  art.  Whether  Charles 
Lamb  writes  about  Shakespeare  or  Christ's 
Hospital  or  ears  is  of  relatively  slight  import- 
ance compared  with  the  question  whether  in 
one  essay  or  another  Lamb  is  at  one  of  his  in- 
comparable best  moments  of  inspiration. 

II 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Remy  de  Gourmont  says,  apropos  Brune- 
tiere's  views  of  Renan: 

Centre  I'opinion  commune,  la  critique  est  peut-etre  Ic  plus 
subjectif  de  tous  les  genres  litteraires;  c'est  une  confession 
perpetuelle ;  en  croyant  analyser  les  oeuvres  d'autrui,  c'est 
soi-meme  que  Ton  devoile  et  que  Ton  expose  au  public.  .  .  . 
voulant  expliquer  et  contredire  Renan,  M.  Brunetiere  s'est 
une  fois  de  plus  confesse  publiquement. 

That  is  true,  except  that  it  may  be  doubted 
whether  one  type  of  literature  is  more  subjec- 
tive than  another,  since  all  types  are  subjective. 
Even  a  work  that  belongs,  according  to  De 
Quincey's  definition,  to  the  literature  of  infor- 
mation as  distinguished  from  the  literature  ot 
power,  even  an  article  in  an  encyclopaedia,  an 
article,  say,  on  Patagonia,  has  a  man  behind 
it;  it  cannot  be  quite  objective  and  impersonal. 

Criticism  should  not  be  set  ofif  too  sharply 
from  other  forms  of  literary  expression.  It  has 
no  special  rights,  privileges,  and  authority;  and 
at  the  same  time  it  has  no  special  disabilities  that 
consign  it  to  a  secondary  place  in  the  divisions 
of  literature.  In  any  unit  of  art,  a  sonnet  or  an 
epic,  a  short  story  or  a  novel,  a  little  review  or 
a  history  of  aesthetics,  a  man  is  trying  to  say 
something.  And  the  value  of  what  he  says  must, 
of  course,  depend  partly  on  the  essential  interest 
of  his  subject;  but  it  depends  to  a  greater  extent 
on  the  skill  with  which  he  puts  words  together, 
creates  interest  in  himself.     Arnold's  essay  on 

12 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Keats  is  less  Keats  than  Arnold.  It  could  not 
have  been  if  Keats  had  not  existed.  But  the 
beauty  of  that  sequence  of  words,  that  essay  in 
criticism,  is  due  to  the  genius  of  Arnold.  Francis 
Thompson  on  Shelley  adds  no  cubit  to  the  stat- 
ure of  Shelley,  but  Thompson's  interpretation  is 
a  marvellous  piece  of  poetic  prose  v^hich  cannot 
be  deducted  without  enormous  loss  from  the 
works  of  Thompson,  from  English  criticism.  We 
read  Pater  on  Coleridge,  not  for  Coleridge  but 
for  Pater,  and  we  read  Coleridge  for  Coleridge, 
not  for  Shakespeare.  Thackeray's  lecture  on 
Swift,  which  is  full  of  animosity  and  miscompre- 
hension, is  a  well-written  revelation  of  Thack- 
eray. Trollope's  book  on  Thackeray,  which  is 
full  of  friendship  and  admiration,  is  an  ill- 
written  revelation  of  Trollope. 

Some  men  of  great  ability,  like  Trollope,  who 
have  written  good  books  themselves,  lack  the 
faculty,  whatever  it  may  be,  of  writing  in  an 
entertaining  fashion  about  the  books  of  other 
men.  Swinburne  is  a  striking  example.  His 
knowledge  of  literature  was  immense,  and  he  had 
the  enthusiasms  and  contempts  that  make  the 
critical  impulse;  but  except  when  the  poet  in 
him  seized  the  pen  and  made  a  passage  of  lyrical 
prose,  his  excursions  into  criticism  are  bewilder- 
ing and  difficult  to  read.  His  sonnets  on  Dickens, 
Lamb,    and   the   Elizabethans    are  worth  more 

13 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

than  all  his  prose.  On  the  other  hand,  Lamb, 
who  wrote  like  an  angel  about  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists,  failed  completely  as  a  dramatist. 

Every  man  who  plays  with  literature  at  all 
must  be  ambitious  to  succeed  in  some  form  of 
art  that  may  be  called  "creative,"  as  distinct 
from  critical  —  a  distinction  which,  since 
Arnold  taught  us  our  lesson,  we  know  does  not 
exist.  The  reason  for  this  ambition  is  plain 
enough.  A  novel  or  a  play  reaches  a  wider  au- 
dience than  a  volume  of  essays,  however  admir- 
able; it  has  a  more  obvious  claim  to  originality, 
and  it  brings  the  author  a  greater  degree  of 
practical  satisfaction.  A  few  doubly  or  trebly 
gifted  men,  Dryden,  Coleridge,  Poe,  Arnold, 
Pater,  Henley,  Stevenson,  Henry  James,  could  do 
first-rate  work  in  more  than  one  genre,  includ- 
ing criticism.  And  a  good  case  could  be  made 
out  to  prove  that  a  man  who  knows  how  to 
handle  words  in  many  ways  is  on  the  whole  the 
best  qualified  to  comment  on  the  art  of  handling 
words.  However  that  may  be,  it  is  certain  that 
in  English  literature  a  critic  who  is  only  a  crit- 
ic seldom  wins  a  conspicuous  position.  Even 
Johnson  was  something  more  than  a  critic,  and 
he  was,  with  all  due  respect,  somewhat  less  than 
a  good  one.  And  Hazlitt,  who  was  a  good  one, 
cvrote  on  many  subjects  besides  books  and  art. 

Because  so  many  little  people  went  into  the 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

business  of  reviewing  and  presumed  to  sit  in 
judgment  on  their  betters,  criticism  early  got  a 
bad  name  in  English  literature,  and  not  all  the 
dignified  work  of  Arnold  and  others  has  yet  suc- 
ceeded in  restoring  the  reputation  of  the  word 
or  the  art.  Criticism  came  to  mean  censure,  a 
connotation  which  persists  in  current  speech. 
The  degeneration  had  already  taken  place  in 
Dryden's  time,  and  he  protested  that  "they 
wholly  mistake  the  nature  of  criticism  who 
think  that  its  business  is  principally  to  find 
fault."  Authors  of  imaginative  works  became 
resentful  and  felt  that  the  critic  was  an  enemy, 
a  nasty  and  incompetent  enemy,  as  indeed  he 
often  was.  An  interesting  compilation  could 
be  made — and  probably  Saintsbury  or  some- 
body else  has  done  it — of  the  retorts  and  coun- 
ter-attacks made  by  writers  of  other  things  than 
criticism  against  the  whole  critical  crew.  Here 
are  a  few  examples : 

Gentle  Jane  Austen  in  "Northanger  Abbey" 
amusingly  defends  her  heroine's  habit  of  read- 
ing novels : 

I  will  not  adopt  that  ungenerous  and  impolitic  custom, 
so  common  with  novel  writers,  of  degrading,  by  their  con- 
temptuous censure,  the  very  performances  to  the  number  of 
which  they  are  themselves  adding  ...  if  the  heroine  of 
one  novel  be  not  patronized  by  the  heroine  of  another,  from 
whom  can  she  expect  protection  and  regard?  .  .  .  Let 
us  leave  it  to  the  Reviewers  to  abuse  such  effusions  of  fancy 
at  their  leisure,  and  over  every  new  novel  to  talk  in  thread- 
bare strains  of  the  trash  with  which  the  press  now  groans. 

15 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

That  sounds  as  if  Miss  Austen's  pride  in  her 
craft  had  been  wounded.  I  know  of  no  record 
that  anybody  ever  spoke  ill  of  her  while  she  was 
living. 

Scott,  whose  generous  soul  was  hurt  by  the 
harsh  squabbles  of  the  Scottish  reviewers,  took 
a  shot  at  the  tribe  in  the  letter  which  appears 
in  the  introductory  note  to  "The  Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel"  in  the  Cambridge  edition: 

As  to  the  herd  of  critics,  it  is  impossible  for  me  to  pay 
much  attention  to  them»  for,  as  they  do  not  understana 
what  I  call  poetry,  we  talk  in  a  foreign  language  to  each 
other.  Indeed,  many  of  these  gentlemen  appear  to  me  to  be 
a  sort  of  tinkers,  who,  unable  to  make  pots  and  pans,  set  up 
for  menders  of  them,  and,  God  knows,  often  make  two  holes 
in  patching  one. 

The  idea  that  the  critic  is  a  secondary  fellow 
who  cannot  make  first-hand  literature  goes  back 
to  Dryden,  the  champion  and  exemplar  of 
sound  criticism,  who  wrote  in  "The  Conquest 
of  Granada": 

They  who  write  ill  and  they  who  ne'er  durst  write 
Turn  critics  out  of  mere  revenge  and  spite. 

Landor  repeats  the  idea  in  a  "Conversation" 
between  Southey  and  Porson,  in  which  Porson 
says:  "Those  who  have  failed  as  writers  turn 
reviewers." 

Writers  and  other  artists  are  usually  sensitive 
and  often  vain.  Some  have  taken  critics  too 
seriously,  have  given  them  too  much  importance 
while  pretending  to  despise  them,  and  have  al- 

i6 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

lowed  themselves  to  be  stung  instead  of  brush- 
ing the  flies  off.  Thanks  to  Shelley,  the  idea  be- 
came current  that  the  ''viperous  murderer,"  the 
critic,  killed  Keats.  It  was  not  so.  Keats  died 
of  tuberculosis.  Though  he  was,  like  all  poets, 
delicately  organized,  he  was  an  unusually  sane 
and  self-reliant  man,  quite  sure  of  the  value  of 
his  work.  Moreover,  in  a  day  when  rough  crit- 
icism was  the  fashion,  the  critics  were,  though 
stupid^  not  especially  rough  on  Keats.  Shelley's 
"J'accuse"  is  flaming  poetry,  but — it  is  not  good 
criticism.  Byron  had  the  right  idea.  With  his 
superior  wit  and  vigour  he  gave  the  reviewers 
ten  blows  for  one  and  used  his  opponents  as  the 
occasion  of  a  delightful  exhibition  of  boxing. 
The  reviewers  were  knocked  out  in  the  second 
round.  "English  Bards  and  Scottish  Review- 
ers" is  still  in  the  ring,  as  I  have  pleasantly  dis- 
covered by  re-reading  it. 

The  notion  that  the  critic  will,  or  can,  do 
damage  to  the  artist  persisted  long  after  Shelley 
and  is  perhaps  still  believed.  In  1876,  Sidney 
Lanier,  a  man  of  good  sense  and  great  bravery, 
whom  the  flies,  or  the  "vipers,"  had  but  lightly 
nipped,  wrote  in  a  letter  to  his  father: 

What  possible  claim  can  contemporary  criticism  set  up 
to  respect — that  criticism  which  crucified  Jesus,  stoned 
Stephen,  hooted  Paul  for  a  madman,  tried  Luther  for  a 
criminal,  tortured  Galileo,  bound  Cohimbus  in  chains,  drove 
Dante  into  a  hell  of  exile,  made  Shakespeare  write  the  son- 
net,   "Wheni   in    disgrace    of    fortune    and    men's    eyes,"    gave 

17 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Milton  £5  for  "Paradise  Lost,"  kept  Samuel  Johnson  cooling 
his  heels  on  Lord  Chesterfield's  doorstep,  reviled  Shelley  as 
an  unclean  dog,  killed  Keats,  cracked  jokes  on  Gluck, 
Schubert,  Beethoven,  Berlioz,  and  Wagner,  and  committed 
so  many  other  impious  follies   and   stupidities? 

Lanier's  charges  are  not  all  quite  true.  He 
mixed  up  the  sins  of  criticism  with  the  sins  of 
politics,  economics,  and  other  dreadful  affairs. 
But  his  outburst  is  a  good  illustration  of  the 
quarrel  between  the  "author"  and  the  "critic." 
Especially  when  the  author  has  for  the  moment 
lost  his  sense  of  humour. 

The  best  treatment  of  the  critic  by  the  author, 
as  also,  perhaps,  of  the  author  by  the  critic,  is 
humourous.  In  "One  of  Our  Conquerors," 
Meredith  lays  out  the  art  critics: 

He  had  relied  and  reposed  on  the  dicta  of  newspaper 
critics;  who  are  sometimes  unanimous,  and  are  then  taken 
for  guides,  and  are  fatal. 

Washington  Irving,  in  a  delightful  little 
paper  called  "Desultory  Thoughts  on  Critic- 
ism," quietly  places  the  reviewer  in  the  low  seat 
where  he  belongs.  I  shall  not  quote  from  the 
essay,  but  merely  refer  the  reader  to  it  and  es- 
pecially to  the  introductory  quotation  from 
Buckingham's  "Rehearsal,"  in  which  the  critic 
is  set  in  a  still  lower  seat. 

Finally — for  these  quotations — Dr.  Holmes, 
who  lived  all  his  life  surrounded  by  praise  and 
comfort,  puts  his  finger  gently  on  the  parasitism 

i8 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

of  the  critic.   The  passage  is  in  "The  Poet  at 
the  Breakfast  Table": 

Our  cpi^oic  literature  is  becoming  so  extensive  that  no- 
body is  safe  from  its  ad  infinitum  progeny.  A  man  writes 
a  book  of  criticisms.  A  Quarterly  Rcvinv  ^ criticises  the 
critic.  A  Monthly  Magazine  takes  up  the  critic's  critic.  A 
Weekly  Journal  criticizes  the  critic  of  the  critic's  critic,  and 
a  daily  paper  favours  us  with  some  critical  remarks  on  the 
performance  of  the  writer  in  the  Weekly,  who  has  criticised 
the  critical  notice  in  the  Monthly  of  the  critical  essay  in  the 
Quarterly  on  the  critical  work  we  started  with.  And  thus 
we  see  that  as  each  fllea  "has  smaller  fleas  that  on  him  prey," 
even  the  critic  himself  cannot  escape  the  common  lot  of  be- 
ing bitten. 

To  what  extent  is  the  critic  parasitic?  To  this 
extent:  he  is  dealing  with  ideas  already  ex- 
pressed, with  cooked  and  predigested  food.  It  is 
easier  for  any  mind  to  think  of  something  to  say 
about  an  idea  that  has  already  gone  through 
cerebral  processes  than  it  is  to  take  the  raw  ma- 
terial of  life  and  make  something.  You  may  sit 
on  a  bench  in  the  park  and  watch  the  people 
and  never,  for  the  life  of  you,  conceive  a  good 
story.  Then  O.  Henry  comes  along  and  makes 
twenty  stories.  After  he  has  done  it,  you  can 
write  something  very  brilliant  about  what  O. 
Henry  saw  from  the  same  bench  that  you  sat  on. 
And  you  can  make  neat  remarks  about  the  re- 
semblances and  dififerences  between  O.  Henry, 
Boccaccio,  and  H.  C.  Bunner.  That  may  be 
worth  doing,  if  your  remarks  are  really  neat. 
For  then  you  may  be  readable. 

And  that  is  the  function  of  the  critic,  to  be 

19 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

readable,  to  make  literature  of  a  sort.  The  crit- 
ic is  always  playing  his  own  game,  selfish,  ego- 
tistical, expressive  of  his  own  will,  and  no  more 
disinterested  than  was  Arnold  himself  when  he 
took  his  pen  in  hand  to  slay  a  Philistine  or  to 
sign  a  contract  with  his  manager  for  a  lecture 
tour  in  America.  In  playing  his  own  game  the 
critic  may  help  the  game  of  another  author  by 
crying  him  up  and  advertising  him.  But  a  hun- 
dred critics,  clamouring  in  the  fatal  unanimity 
at  which  Meredith  pokes  fun,  cannot  make  the 
fortunes  of  a  book  or  influence  at  the  creative 
source  the  work  of  a  man  sufficiently  strong  and 
original  to  be  worth  reading.  And  the  same 
hundred  critics  with  lofty  hatred  of  bad  writ- 
ing cannot  prevent  bad  books  from  being  writ- 
ten and  read.  George  Eliot  made  it  a  rule  not 
to  read  criticisms  of  her  work  because  she  found 
it  necessary  to  be  preserved  "from  that  dis- 
couragement as  an  artist  which  ill-judged  praise 
no  less  than  ill-judged  blame  tends  to  produce 
in  me."  The  implication  that  criticism,  favor- 
able or  unfavorable,  is  ill-judged  gives  us  an  ad- 
dition to  our  notes  on  what  authors  think  of 
critics.  I  doubt  whether,  if  that  strong-minded 
woman  had  read  everything  that  was  written 
about  her  before  and  after  her  death,  she  would 
have  altered  a  single  sentence.  Did  Hardy  stop 
writing  novels  because  of  the  ignorant  attacks 

20 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

on  "Jude"?  I  would  not  accept  without  ques- 
tion Hardy's  own  word  for  it.  I  suspect  that  it 
was  his  own  inward  impulse,  not  determined  by 
the  opinions  of  the  other  people,  that  turned  his 
energy  to  that  stupendous  epic,  "The  Dynasts." 

To  what  extent  can  the  critic  play  the  game 
of  the  reader,  be  guide  and  teacher,  maintain 
standards,  elevate  taste,  make  the  best  ideas  pre- 
vail? Not  to  a  very  great  extent.  Criticism, 
good  or  bad,  is  read  only  by  the  sophisticated, 
by  people  whose  tastes  are  formed  and  who  can 
take  care  of  themselves  in  matters  literary  and 
intellectual.  Who  that  had  not  already  looked 
into  Shakespeare  and  Plato  ever  heard  of  Pater? 
The  journals  that  print  intelligent  articles  about 
literature  and  art  have  a  small  circulation; 
they  are  missionaries  to  the  converted;  their 
controversial  discussions  of  general  principles 
or  of  the  merits  of  an  individual  are  only  family 
feuds.  Critics  play  with  each  other  in  a  pro- 
fessional game.  The  few  amateurs  who  sit  as 
spectators  are  a  select  minority  who  have  seen 
the  game  before  and  who,  though  not  in  the 
professional  class,  are  instructed,  cultivated, 
have  some  knowledge  of  the  plays.  The  critical 
game  is  enjoyed  by  those  who  are  themselves 
critical  and  least  in  need  of  enlightenment. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  a  great  game — when  it  is 
played  well. 

21 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

The  author  of  a  book  on  golf  illustrates  it 
with  the  stances  and  swings  of  better  players 
than  himself;  he  makes  an  anthology.  A  collec- 
tion of  essays  by  various  authors  would  illus- 
trate the  game  better  than  the  plays  of  a  single 
critic,  a  much  more  competent  critic  than  I.  I 
do  not  pretend  that  the  essays  in  this  book  are 
first-rate  specimens  of  how  the  strokes  should 
be  made.  But  even  a  small  fellow  may  flatter 
himself  that  he  has  an  individual  way  of  look- 
ing at  things  which  may  give  unity  of  interest 
to  a  collection  of  papers.  At  any  rate  he  has  a 
right  to  exhibit  his  methods,  and  nobody  is 
obliged  to  watch  him  or  play  with  him. 

Most  of  these  papers  have  been  published  in 
reviews  and  magazines,  The  Freeman,  The  Dial, 
The  New  Republic,  the  Boston  Herald,  the  At- 
lantic Monthly,  the  Literary  Review  of  the 
New  York  Evening  Post,  the  New  York 
Tribune.  » 

The  essay  on  Joseph  Conrad  appeared  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  in  1906.  I  am  proud  only  of 
the  date.  Sixteen  years  ago  Conrad  was  not 
universally  recognized;  some  of  his  best  work 
had  not  been  done;  and  many  finer  essays  than 
mine  had  not.yet  been  written.  If  I  was  not  the 
first  American  critic  to  pursue  that  mysterious 
mariner  across  enchanted  seas,  at  least  I  can 
swear  before  the  critical    court    of    admiralty 

22 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

rhat  the  waters  were  not  crowded  with  little 
craft  like  mine.  It  is  a  pleasure  to  read  again 
a  few  letters  which  hail  me  for  hailing  Conrad 
and  which  make  me  believe  that  I  did  intro- 
duce the  master  to  a  few  readers.  If  so,  I  have 
not  lived  in  vain. 

But  my  pride  is  somewhat  reduced  by  the 
consideration  that  any  reader  intelligent  enough 
to  look  at  a  literary  essay  in  the  Atlantic  Month- 
ly must  sooner  or  later  have  discovered  Con- 
rad for  himself  without  the  assistance  of  a  critic. 
However,  I  hug  with  amusement  the  memory 
of  a  Harvard  professor  who  threw  up  his  hands 
and  said:  "My  God!  I  had  no  idea  there  was  a 
man  living  who  could  write  like  that!"  To  the 
professorial  mind  in  those  days  English  liter- 
ature stopped  officially  with  the  death  of 
Browning  or,  at  the  latest,  with  the  deaths  of 
Stevenson  and  Pater.  The  essay  itself  is  a  little 
professorial,  enfeebled  by  a  sort  of  Boston- 
Harvard  timidity,  utterly  failing  to  express  the 
wild  joy  which  I  felt.  The  second  paper  on 
Conrad,  written  fifteen  years  later,  is  not  so  hesit- 
ant. It  is  interesting  to  look  again  at  the  biblio- 
graphical footnote  to  the  first  essay  and  see  how 
Conrad's  few  books  were  scattered  among  the 
publishers.  I  could  not  find  "An  Outcast  of  the 
Islands"  except  in  the  Tauchnitz  edition.  To- 
day his  work  is  collected.  There  is  a  handsome 

23 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

subscription  edition.  And  Mr.  Doubleday  tells 
me  that  a  new  book  by  Conrad  has  an  assured 
immediate  sale  of  twenty  to  thirty  thousand. 
Perhaps,  after  all,  we  who  cheered  long  ago 
when  it  was  not  the  fashion  to  cheer  have  justi- 
fied our  miserable  existence  as  critics. 

The  essay  on  Tolstoy  was  written  in  the  two 
months  immediately  after  his  death.  Mr.  Ellery 
Sedgwick  asked  me  to  write  it  for  the  Atlantic 
Monthly  and  then  rejected  it.  It  was  published 
in  the  New  York  Call.  I  bear  no  bitter 
grudge  against  Mr.  Sedgwick  for  returning  an 
article  that  he  had  ordered.  But  I  am  con- 
vinced, as  I  read  the  article  over  again,  that  he 
is  an  incompetent  critic  of  criticism.  Sometimes 
editors  and  publishers,  whose  business  it  is  to 
provide  the  arena  and  assemble  the  spectators, 
play  their  part  of  the  game  stupidly.  But  on 
the  whole  I  think  they  are  more  than  generous 
to  second-rate  performers.  If  I  owned  a  maga- 
zine I  should  be  very  grudging  of  the  space  I 
gave  to  literary  chatter — except  my  own. 

A  critical  friend — we  critics  suffer  from  each 
other — admonishes  me  that  in  the  foregoing  re- 
marks I  have  treated  an  important  art  in  a  flip- 
pant manner.  Certainly  I  am  not  so  foolish  as 
to  take  my  essays  very  seriously,  and, I  believe 
that  much  modern  criticism  is  too  solemn,  that 

24 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

if  we  fooled  with  literature  in  a  lighter  spirit 
we  should  enjoy  it  more  and  be  happier. 

Charles  Lamb  was  not  afraid  to  kick  up  his 
heels,  and  yet  nobody  will  accuse  him  of  being 
a  trivial  clown.  Oscar  Wilde  was  a  man  of  wit, 
sometimes  a  buffoon,  and  he  could  puncture  a 
stupid  piece  of  work  with  ridicule.  But  the  pre- 
vailing tone  of  his  best  essays  is  one  of  dignity 
and  sobriety. 

Good  criticism  is  as  important  as  anything 
that  man  can  put  on  paper.  Moreover,  certain 
subjects  must  be  treated  by  the  critic  with  the 
utmost  gravity.  It  would  be  ow^lishly  humour- 
less, uncritical,  not  to  take  Tolstoy  seriously. 
Essays  about  the  greater  men  of  genius  and  the 
deeper  problems  of  art  must  be  substantial, 
solid,  or  they  are  inappropriate,  out  of  key. 

But  it  is  possible  to  be  sane  and  erudite  with- 
out being  leaden,  to  approach  a  noble  subject 
earnestly  without  striking  an  attitude  of  priestly 
austerity.  Some  of  our  sincerest  contemporaries, 
both  the  academic  and  the  rebellious,  seem  to 
me  to  worry  about  literature,  as  if  it  were  an 
invalid  that  needed  nursing  or  a  dead  man  about 
whom  the  last  word  must  be  said  before  next 
Thursday  afternoon.  They  do  not  get  enough 
fun  out  of  'ut.  They  forget  that  Pater,  who  was 
not  a  mad  wag  and  not  a  dilettante,  could  some- 

25 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

times  see  the  gaiety  of  things  and  was  willing  to 
be  inconclusive. 

Criticism  is  important.  The  best  contempor- 
aneous English  criticism  is  not  good  enough. 
And  even  in  France,  where  we  have  been  taught 
to  look  for  sound  critics,  Flaubert  thought  as 
late  as  1869  that  criticism  was  still  in  its  in- 
fancy. He  wrote  to  George  Sand:  "You  speak 
of  criticism  in  your  last  letter  to  me,  telling  me 
that  it  will  soon  disappear.  I  think,  on  the  con- 
trary, that  it  is,  at  most  only  dawning  .  .  .  When 
will  they  (critics)  be  artists,  only  artists,  but 
really  artists?  Where  do  you  know  a  criticism? 
Who  is  there  who  is  anxious  about  the  work  in 
itself,  in  an  intense  way?  .  .  .  The  unconscious 
poetic  expression?  Where  it  comes  from?  its 
composition,  its  style?  The  point  of  view  of  the 
author?  Never.  That  criticism  would  require 
great  imagination  and  great  sympathy."  To 
which  George  Sand  replied  with  good  sense: 
"The  artist  is  too  much  occupied  with  his  own 
work  to  forget  himself  in  estimating  that  of 
others." 

Since  then  France  has  had  a  generation  of 
critics,  some  of  whom  were  artists.  If  Henne- 
quin,  who  thought  he  was  a  scientific  critic, 
was  not  an  artist,  if  De  Gourmont,  who  smiled 
wisely  at  the  whole  game,  was  not  an  artist,  then 
the   word   means    nothing.     In    England   and 

26 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

America  criticism  has  not  made  much  progress 
since  Pater  died.  I  know  that  I  am  punctuating 
literature  in  the  manner  of  the  academic  fogies. 
But  one  of  the  humours  of  this  sport  is  that  you 
sometimes  do  things  which  are  fouls  when  your 
opponent  is  guilty  of  them. 

I  come  back  gladly  to  the  analogy  of  the 
game.  We  have,  I  believe,  made  progress  in 
one  direction.  In  the  direction  of  fair  play.  We 
cannot  write  like  Hazlitt,  but  we  will  not  hit 
below  the  belt  as  he  did  sometimes.  We  cannot 
write  like  Arnold,  and  his  combination  of  liter- 
ary charm  and  scholarship  makes  us  feel  desper- 
ately small,  but  in  our  descent  from  his  altitude 
we  have  freed  ourselves  from  his  major  vice, 
his  dogmatic  snobbery,  his  bigoted  liberalism. 
The  pulpit-pounder  still  thrives  in  religion  and 
politics;  in  criticism  he  is  becoming  obsolete. 
I  am  sure,  or  at  least  hopeful,  that  this  is  true 
in  America.  I  think  I  see  a  slight  but  appreci- 
able improvement  in  candour,  simplicity,  gen- 
erosity, geniality,  and  fairness  in  attack.  On  the 
whole  we  are  a  little  more  sportsmanlike  than 
some  of  our  elders.  That  is  all  that  I  claim  for 
us.  Our  real  consolation  is  that  the  ancient  and 
honorable  game  is  still  young,  still  to  be  played. 


27 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 

I  am  tempted  to  call  the  following  remarks 
''Reading  Dante  for  Fun."  The  most  austere  of 
poets  should  not  be  treated  with  levity.  But, 
after  all,  poetry,  even  poetry  of  profound  ethic- 
al and  religious  import,  is  to  be  enjoyed.  And 
the  simple  point  that  I  wish  to  make,  as  a  mere 
reader  with  but  a  stumbling  knowledge  of  Ital- 
ian and  almost  no  knowledge  of  the  vast  library 
of  Dante  scholarship,  is  that  Dante  is  accessible 
in  English.  His  book  of  magic  is  at  least  half 
open  even  to  one  who  must  forever  remain  part- 
ly blind  and  deaf  to  the  beauty  of  the  original. 
It  is  a  great  pleasure  to  read  the  convenient  little 
volumes  of  the  Temple  Classics  with  the  Italian 
text  on  the  left-hand  page  and  the  English  on 
the  right,  to  read  idly  or  study  deeply,  accord- 
ing to  mood  and  temperament.  At  any  rate,  let 
us  not  be  overcome  by  the  solemnity  of  the  oc- 
casion or  discouraged  by  the  difficulties,  some 
of  which  the  commentators  have  cleared  away 
and  some  of  which  they  have  made  more  diffi- 
cult. 

31 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Dr.  Toynbee*  finds  that  since  1802  the  Com- 
media  as  a  whole  has  been  translated  into  Eng- 
lish about  once  every  four  years.  And  he  ex- 
cludes from  his  record  American  translators 
and  critics.  Why  did  Dr.  Toynbee  or  the  Brit- 
ish Academy  make  this  commemorative  volume 
so  narrowly  insular?  English  and  American 
scholarship  is  one  institution.  And  American 
Dantists  have  done  good  work.  Though  it  is 
the  fashion  to  scorn  the  Yankee  bards  and  seers, 
Lowell's  essay  and  the  translations  by  Long- 
fellow, Norton,  and  Parsons  are  important  in 
the  history  of  Dante  in  English,  not  British,  lit- 
erature. They  had  literary  gifts,  they  knew 
Italian,  and  they  were  able  to  appreciate  a  uni- 
versal mind.  For  all  their  provinciality  their 
. — shades  can  afford  to  smile  at  their  young  coun- 
tryman, Mr.  Mencken,  who  writes :  "If  I  have 
to  go  to  hell  for  it,  I  must  here  set  down  my 
conviction  that  much  of  the  'Divine  Comedy'  is 
piffle."  Well,  he  ought  to  go  to  hell — to  Dante's 
hell,  which  is  an  entertaining  and  hospitable 
place.  In  the  cold  prose  of  Norton  or  John 
Carlyle,  where  the  melody  is  necessarily  lost, 
there  may  be  some  passages  in  which  an  alert 
modern  reader  cannot  find  great  interest,  but 
the  number  of  lines  of  "piffle"  is  exactly  none. 

♦Britain's  Tribute  To  Dante  in  Literature  and  Art,  A 
Chronological  Record  of  540  Years.  By  Paget  Toynbee. 
London:  Published  for  the  British  Academy,  1921. 

32 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 

It  is  not  to  be  expected  that  all  men,  even  all 
literary  men,  will  respond  to  Dante.  Horace 
Walpole  called  him  "extravagant,  absurd,  dis- 
gusting; in  short,  a  Methodist  parson  in  Bed- 
lam." This  is  amusing,  even  refreshing,  in  view 
of  the  too  pious  devotion  of  some  later  English- 
men. But  the  eighteenth  century  was  not  the 
time  for  English  appreciation  of  Dante,  and 
Walpole,  witty  prosateur,  was  not  the  man  to 
enjoy  him.  Dante  was  known,  of  course,  to 
Chaucer  and  to  the  Elizabethans  and  Milton, 
and  his  influence  on  English  poetry  was  perhaps 
even  greater  than  Dr.  Toynbce's  record  makes 
evident.  But  it  is  with  the  nineteenth  century, 
which,  bien  entendu,  was  born  intellectually  a 
few  years  before  its  numerical  date,  that  Dante 
becomes  a  power  in  English  literature.  He  is, 
indeed,  a  part  of  the  revival  of  English  roman- 
ticism. The  translations  of  Boyd  and  Gary  ap- 
peared early  in  the  century,  and  from  then  on 
Dante  belonged  to  English  literature,  as  well 
acclimated  as  any  other  foreign  classic.  The 
index  of  Dr.  Toynbee's  record  contains  the 
names  of  almost  all  the  important  English  poets 
from  Scott  to  Francis  Thompson. 

And  it  contains  hundreds  of  other  names,  not 
perhaps  of  great  importance  in  literature,  but 
important  in  this  respect,  that  they  show  the 
appeal  of  Dante  to  a  great  variety  of  minds,  of 

33 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

minds  not  mediaeval,  not  Catholic,  not  Italian. 
Nobody  can  dip  into  him,  however  superficial- 
ly, without  getting  something.  He  has  so  much 
that  everybody  can  be  happy,  from  the  Pope  to 
the  most  pagan  young  poet.  Though  the  true 
Dantist  will  insist  that  the  greatest  of  poets 
must  be  understood,  or  accepted,  entire,  like  his 
own  God  and  his  own  universe,  I  propose  that 
the  anthological  view  of  him  is  proper  and  de- 
lightful. If  he  is  so  rich  and  structurally  per- 
jct  that  no  side  of  him  can  be  neglected,  then 
he  is  so  rich  and  so  strong  that  any  side  of  him 
can  be  neglected.  You  can  sit  under  a  tree  on 
the  side  of  a  mountain  without  comprehending 
the  mountain,  but  deriving  much  happiness 
from  the  tree,  the  altitude,  and  the  view. 

The  interpreters  of  Dante's  stupendous  unity 
are  all  true  to  Dante,  in  that  they  try  to  find 
*ome  complete  explanation  of  him  and  will  tol- 
erate no  neglect  of  his  least  detail.  Dante  him- 
self, for  all  his  mystery  and  multiple  meanings, 
is  quite  explicit  about  the  indivisibility,  the  in- 
tegrity, of  his  work.  So  that  the  episodic,  in- 
complete view  of  him,  which  I  recommend  to 
other  casual  readers,  is  unphilosophic  and  am- 
ateurish. Let  us  concede  that  and  at  the  same 
time  let  us  reserve  the  right  to  be  cheerfully 
weary  of  systems  where  the  "benumbed  con- 
ceiving soars."  Ruskin  speaks  the  indubitable 
truth:  "The  central  man  of  all  the  world,  as 

34 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 

representing  the  imaginative,  moral,  and  intel- 
lectual faculties,  all  at  their  highest,  is  Dante." 
But  such  a  genius  is  too  awful  to  contemplate, 
and  it  is  more  comfortable  to  keep  this  side 
idolatry. 

Moreover,  the  interpreters,  seeking  to  com- 
prehend Dante's  vast  totality,  do  not  discover 
complete  unity  among  themselves.  Mr.  Walter 
Arensberg*  thinks  that  he  has  unlocked  the 
mystery,  and  I  think  that  he  has.  But  as  I  had  a 
little  to  do  with  filing  that  key  I  will  not  say 
how  well  I  think  it  turns  in  the  wards  of  the 
lock;  I  will  leave  him  to  the  mercies  of  other 
critics  and  merely  note  that  six  centuries  after 
Dante's  death  we  have  a  novel  interpretation. 

And  then  comes  Professor  Courtney  Lang- 
don**  with  another.  One  of  his  ideas  seems  to 
me  just,  though  debatable — namely,  that  any 
modern  man  has  the  right  to  find  anything  in 
Dante  that  he  can  find,  to  derive  the  sort  of  joy 
and  wisdom  that  suit  him,  the  reader,  whether 
or  not  Dante  would  recognize  that  reader's 
meaning.  The  poet  exists  for  our  benefit  and, 
like  the  Bible,  does  not  forbid  but  justifies  the 
multitude  of  sects  and  individual  expositors. 
That  idea  alone  is  worth  Professor  Langdon's 

*The  Crytography  of  Dante.  By  Walter  Arensberg.  New 
York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1921. 

**The  Divine  Comedy  of  Dante  Alighieri.  The  Italian 
Text  with  a  Translation  in  English  Blank  Verse  and  a  Com- 
mentary. By  Courtney  Langdon.  Cambridge :  Harvard  Uni- 
versity Press.  3  vols. 

35 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

labor,  and  it  will  be  interesting  to  see  how  he 
develops  it.  Unfortunately,  his  translation  is 
worse  than  useless.  He  simply  has  not  the  gift 
of  English  verse.  His  own  verses,  prefixed  to 
the  several  canticles,  are  absurd  doggerel;  they 
remind  one  of  Longfellow's  lovely  sonnets  (the 
best  poems  he  ever  wrote)  only  by  their  posi- 
tion of  naive  rivalry  with  the  splendor  that  fol- 
lows. And,  what  is  more  strange.  Professor 
Langdon  writes  abnominable  prose,  such  as- 
saults upon  the  ear  as  'Verse's-  rhythm"  and 
"Divine  Comedy's  last  part."  If  the  poet  ex- 
ists for  us,  in  English  or  Italian,  one  of  the 
things  to  learn  from  him  is  how  to  write. 

The  poet  exists  for  us.  That  is  an  excellent 
idea.  It  is  our  privilege  to  take  what  we  enjoy 
and  reject  what  we  do  not  like  or  understand. 
I  cannot  be  interested  in  Dante's  ethics,  which 
interested  him  so  profoundly  and  is  the  bone  of 
his  thought.  His  "stern  indignant  moral,"  as 
Carlyle  called  it,  is  for  me  no  part  of  the  beauty 
of  the  "mystic  song."  I  cannot  regard  without 
suspicion,  even  in  a  New  Englander,  Norton's 
statement  to  Dr.  Dinsmore  that  the  quality  of 
the  Commedia,  other  than  its  beauty,  which  at- 
tracted him  to  Dante  was  "his  powerful  ex- 
position of  moral  penalties  and  rewards."  Other 
than  its  beauty?  What  does  that  mean?  If  the 
qualities  of  the  Commedia    can    be    separated 

36 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 

(Dante  happened  to  believe  that  they  can  not 
be),  let  us  throw  the  ethics,  the  penalties,  and 
rewards  to  the  four  winds.  Let  us  keep  as  much 
as  we  can  grasp  of  the  beauty  of  the  episodes, 
the  images,  the  phrases,  the  structure,  whatever 
gives  delight. 

The  beauty  of  the  fifth  canto  of  Inferno  does 
not  depend  on  the  ethical  fact  that  the  carnal 
sinners  are  punished,  but  on  the  poetic  fact  that 
their  pathetic  loves  on  earth  are  recalled  and 
that  their  punishment  is  vividly,  physically 
dramatized.  The  tragic  pity  and  terror  of  it 
break  through  the  baldest  translation  stripped 
of  the  enchantment  of  the  original  verse.  Many 
English  poets  have  been  tempted  to  try  to  render 
that  famous  fifth  canto.  Mr.  Arensberg  has 
made  the  best  version  that  I  have  seen.  His 
version  is  in  the  terza  rima,  a  difficult  thing  to 
manage  in  English,  and  he  succeeds  in  making 
a  good  English  poem,  a  shade  finer  than  a  mere 
tour  de  force.  I  doubt  whether  he  or  any  other 
poet  can  so  well  translate  the  entire  Commedia 
in  the  same  form,  though  the  attempt  has  been 
made.  The  terza  rlma  has  never  been  quite 
naturalized  in  our  language.  Even  such  a  mas- 
ter as  Shelley  can  not  turn  it  perfectly.  We  im- 
ported the  sonnet  as  easily  as  the  apple  and  we 
made  some  French  forms  grow  thriftily  in  our 
hardy  garden.  The  terza  rima  remains  artificial 

37 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

and  foreign,  peculiarly  Italian  and  more  pecul- 
iarly Dante;  he  made  it  his  own  and  moved  at 
ease  in  its  exacting  rigidities.  He  was  in  thought 
and  form  a  diabolical  magician. 

In  order  to  show  the  terza  rima  in  English 
and  to  suggest  (not  to  solve!)  the  problem  of 
translation,  let  us  look  at  three  versions  of  the 
last  ten  lines  of  the  fifth  canto  of  Inferno,  the 
story  of  Paolo  and  Francesca.  Francesca  is 
speaking  and  tells  how  she  and  her  lover  read 
the  story  of  Lancelot  and  Guinevere — romance 
within  romance!  First,  Norton's  clear,  deliber- 
ately uninspired  prose: 

"When  we  read  of  the  longed-for  smile  being  kissed  by- 
such  a  lover,  this  one,  who  never  shall  be  divided  from  me, 
kissed  my  mouth  all  trembling.  Gallehaut  was  the  book, 
and  he  wrote  it.    That  day  we  read  no  farther  in  it!" 

While  the  one  spirit  said  this,  the  other  was  so  weeping 
that  through  pity  I  swooned  as  if  I  had  been  dying,  and 
fell  as  a  dead  body  falls. 

Then  Longfellow  in  traditional  blank  verse 
(and  it  is  good  verse;  he  knew  his  business)  : 

"Whenas  we  read  of  the  much  longed-for  smile 
Being  by  such  a  noble  lover  kissed, 
This  one,  who  ne'er  from  me  shall  be   divided, 
Kissed  me  upon  the  mouth  all  palpitating. 
Galeotto  was  the  book  and  he  who  wrote  it. 
That  day  no   farther  did  we  read  therein." 
And  all  the  while  one  spirit  uttered  this. 
The  other  one  did  weep  so  that,  for  pity, 
I  swooned  away  as  if  I  had  been  dying, 
And  fell,  even  as  a  dead  body  falls. 

38 


DANTE  IN  ENGLISH 
Finally,  Arensberg  in  terza  rima: 

"When  we  had  read  how  one  so  amorous 

Had  kissed  the  smile  that  he  was  longing  for, 
This  one,  who  always  must  be  by  me  thus, 

Kissed  me  upon  the  mouth,  trembling  all  o'er; 
Galcot  the  book,  and  he  'twas  written  by! 
Upon  that  day  in  it  we  read  no  more." 

So  sorely  did  the  other  spirit  cry, 
While  the  one  spoke,  that  for  the  very  dread 

I  swooned  as  if  I  were  about  to  die, 
And  I  fell  down  even  as  a  man  falls  dead. 

Those  versions,  I  submit,  are  all  good;  and  I 
risked  the  tedium  of  repeating  the  same  idea  of 
Dante  in  the  English  of  three  different  trans- 
lators. Because  my  simple  point  is  that  Dante 
in  English  is  interesting — to  anybody  who  cares 
for  English  literature. 


39 


DANTE'S    POLITICAL    PHILOSOPHY. 


DANTE'S  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY 

Dante^S  De  Monarchia  is  usually  treated  by 
the  commentators  as  a  mere  footnote  to  the  Corn- 
media;  and  this  subordination  is  justifiable  be- 
cause the  poet  in  Dante  overwhelms  all  other 
expressions  of  his  genius  and  also  because  the 
Commedia  contains  much  political  philosophy, 
some  of  which  De  Monarchia  elucidates. 
But  De  Monarchia,  considered  by  itself,  is  a 
work  of  great  importance.  Even  if  by  some  un- 
thinkable accident  the  Commedia  had  been  lost 
and  De  Monarchia  had  survived,  it  would 
remain  a  significant  treatise  on  the  state  and  the 
papacy  and  would  deserve  to  be  regarded  as  we 
regard  the  political  writings  of  philosophers 
from  Plato  to  Hobbes.  To  be  sure,  the  chief 
interest  of  the  work  for  us  lies  in  the  fact  that 
Dante  wrote  it,  and  it  would  lose  some  of  its 
value  if  it  were  isolated  from  the  rest  of  his 
thought;  the  amazing  unity  of  his  mind  and 
the  coherence  of  his  purpose  make  a  piecemeal 
view  of  any  part  of  him  essentially  false.  His 
vision  of  earth  and  heaven  has  a  thousand  as- 
pects but  no  fragments.  Even  the  unfinished 
works,  II  Convivio  and  De  Vulgari  Eloquentia, 

43 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

are  not  fragments  but  are  rather  to  be  read  as 
partial  manifestations  of  a  singular  and  consist- 
ent plan. 

De  Monarchia  is  a  vision  of  earthly  well-be- 
ing. It  is  an  argument,  prosaic  and  heavy  in  the 
English  translations  and  very  difficult  in  the 
original/  I  should  suppose,  even  to  an  excellent 
Latin  scholar.  But  the  argument  embodies  a 
dream  of  the  greatest  of  dreamers.  The  first 
part  sets  forth  the  necessity  of  empire.  Only 
under  a  single  world-governing  monarch  are 
possible  the  solidarity  of  mankind  and  the  full- 
est possible  development  of  the  human  spirit. 
In  unity  man  can  find  peace  and  justice.  Man 
is  made  in  the  image  of  God,  and  God  is  one; 
wherefore  man  in  imitation  of  God  must  make 
the  secular  world  conform  to  the  universe  and 
set  up  a  unique  earthly  dominion.  In  the  nature 
of  things  empire  is  divinely  ordained  and  this 
is  further  proved  by  the  fact  that  Christ  willed 
to  be  born  under  the  Emperor  Augustus. 

The  second  part  seeks  to  show  that  the  Ro- 
man empire  was  appointed  by  God  to  rule  the 
world.  It  was  established  by  the  aid  of  mir- 
acles, which  confirm  it  as  especially  created  by 
the  will  of  God.  Christ  died  under  the  empire; 
if  the  empire  had  not  been  the  rightful  temporal 
authority,  Christ  would  have  been  punished  by 
the  agent  of  an  unjust  power,  his  suffering  would 

44 


DANTE'S  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY 

have  been  unlawful  and  therefore  the  sin  of 
Adam  would  not  have  been  duly  expiated. 
Rome  was  born  to  command,  because  it  did,  in 
point  of  fact,  conquer  the  world,  and  also  be- 
cause the  histories  of  its  many  heroes  and  pa- 
triots show  that  the  Roman  citizen  loved  right 
and  justice. 

The  third  part  is  an  argument  for  the  separ- 
ation of  church  and  state,  which  are  independ- 
ent authorities  both  deriving  directly  from  God. 
Many  false  arguments  for  the  temporal  power 
of  the  church  are  refuted.  Though  the  emperor, 
as  a  man,  is  the  first  son  of  the  church  and  should 
obey  it  like  other  Christians,  yet  as  emperor  he 
owes  allegiance  only  to  God,  whom  he  repres- 
ents on  earth  in  temporal  matters  as  the  pope 
represents  God  in  spiritual  matters.  The  very 
nature  of  the  church,  its  essential  spiritual  func- 
tion, forbids  it  the  possession  of  temporal  power. 

Have  we  here,  then,  nothing  but  a  defence 
of  an  empire  that  has  been  dust  these  many 
centuries,  and  stale  scholastic  arguments  for  the 
separation  of  church  and  state,  a  long  settled 
question  in  theoretic  politics  and  practically 
settled  in  most  countries?  There  is  much  more 
than  that  in  De  Monarch ia  even  for  the  most 
confident  modern  democrat,  who  may  regard 
emperor  and  pope  as  twin  tyrants  and  for  whom 
the  word   "mediaeval"   has   derogatory  conno- 

45 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

tations.  It  is  true  that  the  empire  under  which 
Dante  actually  lived  is  dead  as  the  empire  of 
the  Caesars  and  that  the  empire  of  Dante's 
dream  was  never  realized  in  the  workaday 
world.  As  a  political  pamphlet  De  Monarchia 
is  obsolete  without  even  the  persistent  contempo- 
raneity of  some  eighteenth  century  tracts.  In  a 
sense  Dante's  treatise  died  at  birth.  Bryce,  who 
gives  an  excellent  summary  of  it  in  his  "Holy 
Roman  Empire,"  shows  that  this  plea  for  em- 
pire, conceived  by  the  supreme  mind  of  the  age, 
was  the  epitaph  of  the  existing  empire.  It  was, 
indeed,  a  swan-song,  not  of  the  author,  who  was 
still  to  take  us  to  Paradise  and  put  his  dream  in 
lovelier  form,  but  of  empire  in  the  Catholic 
Christian  sense  of  "holy."  The  empire  that 
persisted  after  the  thirteenth  century  grew  fur- 
ther and  further  away  not  only  from  a  poet's 
dream  but  from  any  practical  possibility  of 
united  political  authority.  The  solidarity  of 
mankind  was  not  to  be  achieved  through  Rome 
or  Christ,  and  Dante  was  not,  as  he  thought,  an- 
nouncing a  new  era,  but  summing  up  a  passing 
era. 

But  the  truth  of  a  dream  inheres  in  the  dream 
itself  and  is  measured  only  in  a  secondary  way 
by  the  course  of  events.  De  Monarchia  has  for 
us  at  least  the  value  of  a  pacifist  tract,  the  noble 
core  of  which  is  not  obscured  by  the  strangeness 

46 


DANTE'S  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY 

of  some  of  the  reasoning  or  by  the  destruction 
of  Dante's  political  milieu.  Like  some  other 
pacifist  documents  it  is  the  work  of  an  aggres- 
sive militant  mind.  Dante  had  lived  and  suffer- 
ed in  a  world  continuously  at  war.  The  contest- 
ing powers,  great  and  small,  were  so  compli- 
cated that  the  historian  has  difficulty  in  keeping 
them  clear.  To  the  major  quarrels  between 
church  and  state  and  the  strife  of  the  city- 
republics  with  one  or  the  other  or  both  were 
added  an  internal  warfare  between  economic 
classes  and  feuds  between  castes  and  families,  all 
hopelessly  intricate. 

In  this  bloody  confusion  Dante  had  played 
the  part  not  of  closet  philosopher  au-dessus  de 
la  melee,  but  of  soldier  and  civil  official.  And  to 
the  last  he  was  temperamentally  a  fighter, 
though  forced  by  circumstances  to  drop  the 
sword  for  the  pen.  He  was  not  in  the  eyes  of 
his  contemporaries  what  he  has  become  for  us, 
the  supreme  solitary  genius  exiled  by  an  un- 
grateful city,  but  was  simply  one  of  a  thousand 
members  of  a  beaten  party.  He  was  not  a  pa- 
thetic, unappreciated  poet  but  a  pertinacious  par- 
tisan who  happened  to  be  on  the  losing  side.  He 
knew  war  and  misery  and  defeat.  Yet  his  plea 
for  peace  is  by  no  means  that  of  a  weary  bellig- 
erent; it  is  that  of  a  bellicose  champion  of  cer- 
tain principles.  And  so,  though  those  principles 

47 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

do  not  appeal  to  us  and  though  the  expression 
of  them  is  laborious,  even  turgid,  De  Monarchia 
is  still  hot  with  conviction. 

The  instrument  of  peace  was  the  one  form 
of  government  that  Dante  knew,  the  empire. 
Even  if  his  genius  had  taken  the  form  of  vatic- 
ination (he  was  indeed,  as  it  turned  out,  a  poor 
prophet),  he  naturally  could  not  in  his  time 
have  made  himself  familiar  with  leagues  of  na- 
tions and  Wellsian  "world-states."  He  had  to 
ride  on  a  horse,  not  in  a  motor-car.  And  he  rode, 
as  a  worldly  rider,  to  a  fall.  The  tragedy  of  the 
fall  has  in  it  a  large  element  of  dramatic  irony 
because  he  was  so  splendidly  sure  of  his  ideas  at 
exactly  the  moment  when  they  were  least 
secure. 

Dante's  conception  of  an  ideal  empire  had 
nothing  in  common  with  what  we  now  call  im- 
perialism, which  is  mere  commercial  conquest 
and  can  be  led  by  Kaiser  or  democratic  prime 
minister  with  equally  disastrous  results.  Dante 
believed  in  an  imperial  headship  for  the  good 
of  all  humanity.  The  ruler  of  the  world  was  to 
be  the  servant  of  the  world,  not  its  master  and 
exploiter;  a  supreme  monarch  was  to  be  pro- 
tected by  his  lonely  authority  from  the  temp- 
tations that  beset  a  weak  man  clothed  with  limit- 
ed and  contentious  authority;  aloof  from  strife 
and  cupidity,  having  all  and  so  being  beyond 

48 


DANTE'S  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY 

pride  and  ambition,  he  could  be  a  disinterested 
and  just  administrator. 

The  aim  of  empire  is  universal  peace — Dante 
begins  his  argument  almost  in  the  terms  of 
Burke  and  with  something  like  Burke's  com- 
bination of  generosity  and  elaborate  futility — 
peace,  "the  best  of  those  things  that  are  ordained 
for  our  beatitude."  For  on  peace  depends  the 
destiny  of  mankind  to  realize  the  full  power  of 
the  human  mind  in  thought  and  deed.  Dante's 
world  state  is  Utopia,  compounded,  as  all  Uto- 
pias must  be,  of  wisdom  and  utter  impossibili- 
ties, of  sublime  faith  and  facts  half-understood. 
While  he  dreamed  he  did  not  believe  himself  a 
dreamer,  any  more  than  did  Shelley.  He  be- 
lieved intensely  in  the  practical  value  of  his 
vision,  in  its  originality  and  its  finality  as  a  solu- 
tion of  the  problems  of  the  political  world.  He 
says  that  knowledge  of  monarchy  has  been 
shunned  because  it  has  no  di  rect  relation  to  profit, 
and  that  he  will  be  the  first  to  bring  it  from 
obscurity  to  light  for  the  good  of  the  world  and 
for  his  own  glory.  The  humble  servant  and  the 
arrogant  doctor  at  the  bedside  of  the  patient!  It 
is  one  of  the  most  consistent  contradictions  of 
proud  souls.  The  reformer  has  found  a  new 
and  sure  cure  and  cries  "Eureka!" 

In  spite  of  the  practical  failure  of  his  dream, 
which  in  a  sense  defeats  him,  I  do  not  believe 

49 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

that  Dante's  pell-mell  acceptance  of  all  stories 
about  the  greatness  of  Rome,  with  no  apparent 
discrimination,  is  proof  that  he  did  not  know 
what  he  was  about.  He  was  making  a  special 
plea  and  he  pillaged  history  and  legend  to  get 
material  for  the  purposes  of  his  argument.  He 
is  a  dialectician  animated,  like  all  reformers,  by 
unselfish  motives,  but  willing  to  score  a  point  if 
he  can.  We  may  be  fairly  sure  that  Dante  was 
not  a  credulous  person  with  a  childish  view  of 
history,  but  a  sophisticated  controversialist 
handling  his  evidence  for  effect.  Though  he 
mingles  fact  and  fiction  and  though  his  docu- 
mentary resources  were  more  limited  than  ours, 
yet  he  knew  perfectly  what  he  was  trying  to  do, 
and  modern  attempts  to  gloss  him  in  a  patroniz- 
ing and  apologetic  manner  are  generally  mis- 
taken. 

There  is  a  grim  humour  in  the  fate  that  over- 
takes the  works  of  wise  men.  The  treatise  which 
Dante  believed  would  bring  peace  to  a  vexed 
world  became  a  matter  of  strife.  Later  Ghibel- 
lines  used  his  argument,  unfairly,  of  course,  to 
support  the  supremacy  of  the  empire  over  the 
church,  and  ecclesiastical  authority  retorted  by 
condemning  the  book  and  even  threatening  the 
repose  of  Dante's  bones.  A  somewhat  similar 
quarrel  arose  over  Hobbes's  "Leviathan"  three 
centuries  later.    Seeking  to  unite  all  men,  the 

5a 


DANTE'S  POLITICAL  PHILOSOPHY 

political  philosopher  is  attacked  from  both 
sides,  and  if  he  lives  he  finds  that  he  has  poured 
oil  not  on  troubled  waters  but  on  a  fire. 

Though  De  Monarchia  is  much  more  than  a 
footnote  to  the  Commendia  and  is  worth  study 
for  its  own  sake,  yet  the  unity  which  it  seeks  in 
the  world  is  closely  allied  to  the  unity  of  Dante's 
celestial  vision  by  which  he  tried  to  lead  man- 
kind to  God.  Mankind  refused  to  be  cured  of 
its  political  pains  by  De  Monarchia  and  even 
ignored  it  in  spite  of  Dante's  secure  and  grow- 
ing fame  (there  was  no  English  translation 
until  the  late  nineteenth  century).  But  man- 
kind also  never  accepted  and  never  will  accept 
the  supreme  vision  of  the  Commedia.  It  is  a 
beautiful  poem  enjoyed  by  the  literary,  and 
even  in  Italy  it  is  valued,  quite  properly,  as  a 
mere  work  of  art.  The  world  has  never  paid 
much  attention  to  Dante's  declared  purpose  to 
bring  mankind  through  art  to  God.  So  that  in 
one  way  of  regarding  him,  which  may  perhaps 
be  his  way,  he  failed  in  the  Commedia  as  he  did 
in  De  Monarchia.  The  world  of  thinking  and 
acting  men,  whose  salvation  Dante  believed  he 
could  work  by  verse  and  prose,  remains  disunit- 
ed and  contentious,  weaponed  with  such  bitter- 
ness of  heart  and  methods  of  destruction  as  the 
dreamer  of  Inferno  never  dreamed. 


51 


NIETZSCHE 


NIETZSCHE 

It  is  more  than  thirty  years  since  Nietzsche's 
work  was  finished  and  darkness  fell  upon  that 
mighty  intellect  In  1917,  Mr.  W.  M.  Salter, 
who  certainly  knows  the  bibliography  of  Nietz- 
sche, wrote: 

I  can  not  make  out  that  his  influence  is  appreciable  now — 
at  least  in  English-speaking  countries.  .  .  .  He  has,  in- 
deed, given  a  phrase  and  perhaps  an  idea  or  two  to  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw,  a  few  scattering  scholars  have  got  track  of 
him  (I  know  of  but  two  or  three  in  America),  the  great 
newspaper  and  magazine-writing  and  reading  world  has 
picked  up  a  fev/  of  his  phrases,  which  it  does  not  under- 
stand. 

The  preface  of  Frau  Foerster-Nietzsche's  edi- 
tion of  her  brother's  correspondence  with  Wag- 
ner is  dated,  Weimar,  1914,  and  the  English 
translation  was  published  in  192 1.  Dr.  Oscar 
Levy's  preface  to  his  selection  from  the  five  vol- 
umes of  Nietzsche's  correspondence,*  publish- 
ed in  Germany  between  the  years  1900- 1909,  is 
dated  August,  1921. 

So,  although  Nietzsche's  works  are  now  all, 
or  nearly  all,  to  be  read  in  English,  he  is  not 

*  "Selected  Letters  of  Friedrich  Nietzsche."  Edited  by  Dr. 
Oscar  Levy.  Authorized  Translation  by  Anthony  M.  Ludo- 
vico.  New  York:  Doubleday  Page  &  Co. 

ss 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

quite  an  old  story  which  every  literate  child 
should  know.  Professional  students  of  philoso- 
phy seemed  to  have  missed  him  or  to  have  tar- 
dily recognized  him,  and  the  mere  casual  reader 
of  philosophy  may  quietly  dodge  Mr.  Menck- 
en's bludgeon:  ''Only  blockheads  to-day  know 
nothing  of  them  [Nietzsche's  ideas]  and  only 
fools  are  unshaken  by  them."  That  sort  of  ag- 
gressiveness on  the  part  of  a  champion  of  Nietz- 
sche will  not  help  the  master's  ideas  to  prevail ; 
though  it  may  seem  to  be  a  disciple's  repetition 
of  Nietzsche's  superb  arrogance,  it  is  really  not 
true  to  his  spirit.  For  Nietzsche  attacked 
thoughts  and  thinkers,  quarrelled  with  oppon- 
ents who  were  somewhere  near  his  size,  ignored 
the  opinions  of  the  brainless  multitude,  and  was 
content  to  wait  for  time  and  the  slow-moving 
world  to  find  him  out. 

Certainly  he  can  not  be  jammed  down  our 
throat,  and  quite  as  certainly  his  stimulating  and 
cathartic  doses  can  not  be  snatched  from  our  lips 
by  moralistic  prohibitionists.  It  is  possible,  of 
course,  for  a  doctor  to  take  advantage  of  one's 
innocence  and  ignorance  and  put  one  to  sleep 
with  drugs.  That  was  my  own  experience.  Dr. 
Paul  Elmer  More  stole  up  on  me  in  the  dark 
with  a  soporific  little  book,  the  first  I  had  ever 
read  about  Nietzsche.  When  I  came  to,  the 
world  was  at  war.  A  wild  German  philosopher, 

S6 


NIETZSCHE 

who  had  been  quoted  by  a  brutal  German  gen- 
eral named  Bernhardi,  was  responsible  for  the 
violation  of  Belgian  women.  This  was  mani- 
festly absurd,  but  there  was  no  time  to  investi- 
gate and  explain,  even  for  one's  private  satis- 
faction, the  causes  of  this  ridiculous  misunder- 
standing not  only  of  an  individual  philosopher 
but  of  the  relation  of  book-philosophy  to  appal- 
lingly unphilosophic  crimes. 

It  is  amazing  to  find  that  the  absurdity  per- 
sists, that  it  is  necessary  for  Dr.  Levy  to  try  to 
prove  in  192 1  that  Nietzsche  did  not  incite  the 
Germans  to  a  war  of  conquest!  Has  not  the 
hysteria  sufficiently  subsided  for  wise  men  to 
quit  wasting  their  energies  in  a  contest  with 
spooks?  It  was  part  of  Nietzsche's  work  to  rid- 
icule ghosts  and  blow  away  myths,  and  that  he 
should  have  become  a  myth  himself  is  an  irony 
that  he  might  have  enjoyed.  He  gloried  in  be- 
ing misunderstood.  The  true  philosopher  has 
always  been  in  lonely  opposition  to  the  domi- 
nant ideals  of  his  time.  It  is  in  a  tone  not  of 
resentment  or  complaint  but  of  haughty  satis- 
faction that  he  writes  to  Georg  Brandes,  in  the 
last  year  of  his  intellectual  life: 

Your  opinion  of  present-day  Germans  is  more  favourable 
than  mine  ...  all  profound  events  escape  them.  Take, 
for  example,  my  "Beyond  (iood  and  F.vil."  Whiit  bewilder- 
ment it  has  caused  them.  I  have  not  heard  of  a  sinj^le  intelli- 
gent utterance  about  it,  much  less  of  an  intelligent   senti- 

57 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

nient.  I  believe  that  it  has  not  dawned  on  the  most  well- 
intentioned  of  my  readers  that  here  is  the  outcome  of  a 
sane  philosophic  sensibility,  and  not  a  medley  of  a  hundred 
outworn  paradoxes  and  heterodoxes.  Not  a  soul  has  ever 
experienced  the  same  sort  of  thing  that  I  have.  I  never  meet 
anyone  who  has  been  through  a  thousandth  pa.rt  of  the 
same  passionate  struggle. 

Nietzsche's  philosophic  solitude  accounts  in 
part  for  the  excellence  of  his  letters.  In  his 
struggles  with  the  world,  and  his  wilful  alien- 
ation from  it,  he  clung  passionately  to  the  few 
who  were  allied  to  him  by  the  ties  of  blood, 
friendship,  or  intellectual  sympathy.  The  let- 
ters contain  no  philosophic  ideas  which  he  did 
not  express  again  and  again  in  his  professional 
writings.  They  do  contain  something  else,  how- 
ever, moods,  emotions,  pleasures  and  private 
difficulties,  intimacies  which  are  never  quite 
apart  from  the  incessant  battle  of  thought  yet 
belong  to  moments  of  comparative  ease  when 
the  soldier  is  off  duty.  This  philosopher,  whose 
work  is  so  intensely  personal,  who  says  that  he 
wrote  his  books  with  his  whole  body  and  life, 
did  not  completely  express  himself  in  his  books. 
He  poured  his  soul  into  them  and  was  honestly 
naked  and  unashamed.  But  for  all  his  autobio- 
graphical candor,  his  work  is  not  a  promiscu- 
ous confession.  He  labored  over  his  paragraphs 
like  an  artist,  calculated  their  effect,  and  made 
them  personal  only  in  so  far  as  suited  his  philo- 
sophic purpose.   There  remains  a  sensitive  and 

S8 


NIETZSCHE 

reticent  Nietzsche  who  revealed  himself  to  his 
friends  alone. 

He  was  fortunate  in  his  friends.  When  he 
writes  in  the  preface  of  "Human,  All-Too-Hu- 
man," that  he  has  evolved  an  as  yet  non-existent 
company  of  free  spirits,  because  he  needs  them 
and  because  they  are  some  compensation  for  lack 
of  friends,  he  is  posing  in  a  philosophic  attitude 
which  is  quite  justified  by  his  experience  as  a 
thinker  and  writer  but  which  is  not  quite  true 
to  the  private  history  of  Friedrich  Nietzsche. 
He  never  lacked  friends,  and  his  isolation  was 
in  great  measure  self-imposed.  The  most  dis- 
tinguished friend  he  lost  was  Wagner;  the  break 
came  late  in  the  older  man's  life,  and  it  seems 
to  have  been  the  younger  man  who  disrupted 
the  friendship. 

Even  without  Wagner,  Nietzsche's  corres- 
pondents are  numerous  and  varied,  as  many  and 
of  as  many  kinds  as  a  wise  man  needs,  if  he 
chooses  to  make  the  most  of  them.  The  lonely 
philosopher  was  not  neglected  as  man  and 
brother.  He  preferred  to  flock  by  himself.  His 
ill  health  rather  than  the  animosity  of  his 
countrymen  drove  him  out  of  Germany;  and  he 
was  happiest,  as  close  as  he  ever  came  to  happi- 
ness, when  he  concentrated  his  energy  in  his 
work.  He  makes  a  philosophic  virtue  of  neces- 
sity, affects  to  despise  what  he  can  not  have, 

59 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

laments  his  solitude  and  is  proud  of  it.    To  his 

sister  he  writes: 

You  can  not  think  how  lonely  and  out  of  it  I  always  feel 
when  I  am  in  the  midst  of  all  the  kindly  Tartufferie  of  those 
people  whom  you  call  'good,'  and  how  intensely  I  yearn  at 
times  for  a  man  who  is  honest  and  who  can  talk  even  if  he 
were  a  monster,  but  of  course  I  should  prefer  discourse  with 
demi-gods,     .     .     .     Oh,  this  infernal  solitude ! 

A  few  months  later,  when  this  aged  philoso- 
pher is  forty,  he  writes  to  an  old  friend  that  all 
the  people  he  loves  belong  to  the  past  and  re- 
gard him  with  merely  merciful  indulgence. 

We  see  each  other,  we  talk  in  order  to  avoid  being  silent — 
we  still  write  each  other  in  order  to  avoid  being  silent. 
Truth,  however^  glances  from  their  eyes,  and  these  tell  me 
(I  hear  it  well  enough)  :  'Friend  Nietzsche,  you  are  now 
quite  alone !' 

That's  what  I  have  lived  and  fought  for ! 

The  last  sentence  may  be  taken  in  two  ways. 
It  may  mean  that  Nietzsche  strove  for  isolation, 
or  it  may  be  interpreted  bitterly:  ''So  that's 
what  I  get  from  my  friends  for  all  my  labor 
and  struggle!"  Perhaps  both  meanings  are 
there.  The  letter  ends :  "Ah,  dear  friend,  what 
an  absurdly  silent  life  I  lead!  So  much  alone,  so 
much  alone!  So  'childless'!  Remain  fond  of  me; 
I  am  truly  fond  of  you."  That  sounds  like  a  not 
too  human  cry  of  hunger  for  afifection.  The 
man  who  prefers  demi-gods  and  is  confident 
that  he  would  be  worthy  of  their  companship  is 
not  immune  from  the  pangs  of  ordinary  mortals. 

Nietzsche  had  a  self-critical  knowledge  of  his 
60 


NIETZSCHE 

own  needs  and  nature,  and,  so  far  as  circum- 
stances permitted,  he  followed  the  course  that 
pleased  him.  He  sometimes  groaned  but  he 
never  whined.  In  a  letter  to  his  sister,  who  had 
evidently  suggested  the  possibility  of  marriage, 
he  says  that  he  cheerfully  accepts  the  disadvan- 
tages of  independence.  The  list  of  requirements 
that  he  lays  down  are  enough  to  make  us  con- 
gratulate the  impossible  she  whom  he  wisely  re- 
frained from  marrying.  "I  know  the  women 
folk  of  half  Europe,"  he  writes,  "and  wherever 
I  have  observed  the  influence  of  women  on  men, 
I  have  noticed  a  sort  of  gradual  decline  as  the 
result."  That  is  one  of  the  philosopher's  amus- 
ing errors.  He  did  not  know  women  folk  at  all ; 
the  most  fatuous,  almost  the  only  fatuous,  pas- 
sages in  his  works  and  his  letters  are  those  about 
the  ladies,  and  his  letters  to  ladies  are  the  dec- 
larations of  a  free  spirit  shying  off  from  some- 
thing "agreeable  though  perhaps  a  trifle  danger- 
ous." 

Nietzsche  is  at  his  best,  of  course,  when  he 
writes  to  distinguished  men,  the  few  who  recog- 
nized his  genius  and  made  him  glow  in  his  cold 
solitude.  Nietzsche  craved  recognition;  his 
contempt  for  fame  was  largely  a  contempt  for 
sour  grapes.  Brandes  and  Strindberg  put 
wreaths  on  his  head,  and  he  was  proud  of  them. 
He  writes  to  Strindberg: 

6i 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

I  am  the  most  powerful  intellect  of  the  age,  condemned  to 
fulfill  a  stupendous  mission  ...  It  is  possible  that  I 
have  explored  more  terrible  and  more  questionable  worlds 
of  thought  than  anyone  else,  but  simply  because  it  is  in  my 
nature  to  love  the  silent  backwater.  I  reckon  cheerfulness 
among  the  proofs  of  my  philosophy. 

A  man  who  can  write  like  that  of  himself  is 
the  happiest  of  mortals,  for  he  knows  that  he 
belongs  among  the  immortals. 


62 


TOLSTOY 


TOLSTOY 


Tolstoy  closes  the  second  part  of  "Sevasto- 
pol" with  these  words:  "The  hero  of  my  tale, 
whom  I  love  with  all  the  power  of  my  soul, 
whom  I  have  tried  to  portray  in  all  his  beauty, 
who  has  been,  is,  and  ever  will  be  beautiful,  is 
Truth."  That  sentence  was  written  when  Tol- 
stoy was  twenty-seven.  For  fifty  years,  in  novels, 
tales,  essays,  and  exhortations,  he  celebrated  his 
hero  with  unflagging  devotion.  The  deeds  and 
lineaments  of  the  hero  are  not  always  as  other 
men  have  seen  them,  but  the  identity,  the  char- 
acter of  the  hero  is  never  in  doubt.  The  hero 
changes  and  utters  conflicting  wisdom,  not  be- 
cause of  the  worshiper's  inconstancy,  but  be- 
cause Tolstoy  develops,  because  he  outgrows  and 
disavows  his  previous  selves  and  violates  con- 
sistency between  one  book  and  another  in  his 
zeal  to  find  consistency  between  his  next  book 
and  Truth. 

In  ceaseless  pursuit  of  Truth,  Tolstoy  is  led 
through  the  most  stirring  intellectual  and  moral 
experiences  which  modern  man  has  undergone. 

6s 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

He  is  part  of  all  that  we  have  met;  from  the  re- 
motest of  European  countries,  from  a  moment 
in  the  world's  thought  that  is  already  well  be- 
hind us,  his  messages  have  encircled  the  globe 
and  modify  the  living  ideas  of  today.  He 
touched  all  departments  of  thought  and  left 
none  as  it  had  been. 

He  plunged  into  the  nineteenth  century  war- 
fare of  religion  and  science,  found  that  both 
parties  were  priest-ridden  and  arrogant,  and 
wrested  from  both  the  right  of  the  individual  to 
a  simple  faith  and  to  knowledge  free  from  the 
cant  of  the  laboratory.  The  increasing  grumble 
of  the  contest  between  privilege  and  labor — the 
most  portentous  war  the  world  has  seen  and  not 
yet  at  its  crisis — assaulted  his  ears ;  he  hearkened 
while  most  other  members  of  the  narrow  circle 
of  culture  were  deaf  or  indifferent,  and  he  took 
his  stand  on  the  side  of  the  workers  against  his 
own  rank  and  kin.  He  laid  bare  the  motives  of 
war,  in  which  he  had  drawn  a  guilty  sword,  and 
became  a  militant  champion  of  peace.  The  un- 
holy alliance  of  culture,  religion,  and  civil  au- 
thority he  strove  to  dissolve  by  broadsides 
against  each  member  of  the  triune  tyranny,  and 
so  he  conceived  a  new  theory  of  art,  a  new  read- 
ing of  the  gospels,  and  an  anarchism  so  individ- 
ual that  it  excludes  most  other  anarchists.  Under 
the  solemnity  of  marriage  and  the  thin  poetry 

66 


TOLSTOY 

of  romance  he  discerned  the  cloven  hoof  of 
self-indulgence,  and  he  shocked  the  world  with 
a  virile  puritanism,  so  powerful  in  its  terms,  so 
subversive  of  our  timid  codes  that  bashful  Mor- 
ality shrank  from  her  bravest  defender. 

All  the  main  thoroughfares  of  nineteenth 
century  thought  crossed  before  the  doorway  of 
Tolstoy's  house.  He  trafficked  with  all  the  pas- 
sengers, but  joined  no  special  group.  Even  his 
own  disciples  he  allowed  to  go  their  own  way; 
he  took  no  part  in  their  organization  and  left 
them  to  make  their  own  interpretation  and  their 
own  application  of  his  teachings.  Loving  all 
mankind,  having  sympathetic  knowledge  of  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  men,  he  was  nevertheless 
strangely  solitary.  At  the  end  of  his  life  his  de- 
votion to  his  ideas  alienated  from  his  family  this 
inost  tender,  home-loving  man.*  The  young 
idealists  of  the  world  left  him  behind,  for  they 
broke  out  new  highways  of  thought  which  he 
could  not  travel;  young  Russia  sees  in  him  a 
splendid  survival  of  an  elder  age  of  storm  and 
struggle,  calls  him  master  but  not  leader. 

He  justified  in  his  own  life  his  theoretic  in- 
dividualism, because  he  was  great  and  strong 
enough  to  stand  alone.    The  spirit  of  irony  can 

*As  this  book  goes  to  press,  Madam  Tolstoy's  "Autobiography" 
is  being  published  in  The  Freeman.  Her  views  of  the  great  man 
should  be  illuminating,  especially  if  she  does  not  try  to 
minimize  his  defects. 

67 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

not  but  deal  gently  with  the  sincerest,  bravest  of 
men.  Yet  may  she  note  under  the  gray  garment 
of  humility  a  mien  incorrigibly  aristocratic  and 
domineering.  The  most  powerful  mind  in  the 
world  proclaimed  self-submersion  as  the  perfect 
virtue,  because  it  is  the  most  difficult  virtue  for 
a  daring  and  vigorous  spirit  to  attain.  The  foe 
of  privilege,  preaching  that  all  men  are  brothers 
in  love  and  alike  before  the  Lord  as  they  should 
be  before  the  law  of  man,  enjoyed  a  unique  priv- 
ilege— he  was  almost  the  only  man  in  Russia 
who  could  with  impunity  say  what  he  thought. 
He  won  this  right  because  he  was  an  aristocrat 
with  friends  at  court  and  because  the  Russian 
government  dared  not  disregard  the  admiration 
of  the  world  which  had  made  Tolstoy  an  inter- 
national hero.  He  warned  the  mighty  to  walk 
in  the  fear  of  God,  but  they  walked  in  the  fear 
of  Leo  Tolstoy. 

To  remind  ourselves  of  the  titles  of  some  of 
his  books  and  the  order  in  which  they  appeared, 
we  may  divide  his  work  into  seven  parts.  The 
first  part  includes  military  tales  and  autobio- 
graphic sketches:  '^Sevastopol,"  "Two  Hussars.' 
''The  Raid,"  "The  Cossacks,"  "Childhood," 
"Boyhood,"  "Youth."  The  second  part,  begin- 
ning in  1861,  embraces  his  experience  as  school 
teacher,  his  discourses  on  education,  school 
books,  and  stories  for  children    and    peasants. 

68 


TOLSTOY 

The  third  part,  from  1864  to  1878,  comprises 
"War  and  Peace"  and  "Anna  Karenina."  The 
fourth  part  begins  with  his  religious  conversion 
in  1878,  and  is  devoted  to  theological,  ethical 
and  sociological  essays:  "My  Confession,"  "Un- 
ion and  Translation  of  the  Four  Gospels,"  "My 
Religion,"  "What,  Then,  Must  We  Do?"  The 
subjects  treated  in  these  books  he  expounds  over 
and  over  for  the  rest  of  his  life.  Because  it  is 
salient  from  his  other  work  we  may  say  that  the 
"Kreutzer  Sonata"  (1889)  constitutes  a  fifth 
part.  "What  is  Art?"  and  "Resurrection"  may 
be  thought  of  as  a  sixth  part.  Then  follows  the 
concluding  decade  of  warfare  in  pamphlets,  es- 
says, letters,  upon  civil  and  ecclesiastical  au- 
thority and  other  powers  of  darkness. 

Any  such  partition  of  Tolstoy's  work  is  un- 
true to  its  organic  continuity,  its  massive  unity. 
His  books  are  embedded  in  his  life.  Though 
each  novel  stands  alone  in  self-sustaining  integ- 
rity, intelligible  to  all  the  world,  yet  each  gains 
in  clearness  and  power  for  being  understood  in 
relation  to  the  mind  that  produced  it.  This  col- 
ossus of  solitary  protest,  rising  rough  and  vol- 
canic above  the  flats  of  modern  thought,  is  vast- 
er when  seen  close  to  his  intellectual  base. 
Viewed  from  a  distance  some  sides  of  him, 
some  contours,  are  blurred  and  deceptive.  No 
part  of  his  work  can   be  wholly   apprehended 

69 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

unless  all  parts  are  brought  into  the  range  of 
vision. 

On  the  day  of  his  death  he  was  the  most  fa- 
mous man  of  letters  in  the  world.  From  the  first 
report  of  his  final  illness  bulletins  flew  over  the 
cables  in  hourly  succession.  Yet  for  several 
weeks  after  his  death,  repeated  inquiry  among 
the  dealers  in  English  and  foreign  books  in  Bos- 
ton (reputed  center  of  culture  and  high  think- 
ing) showed  that  there  never  had  been  much  de- 
mand for  Tolstoy's  books,  except  his  novels,  and 
that  the  momentary  rise  of  interest  caused  by 
his  death  had  not  disturbed  the  dust  on  such 
books  as  "What,  Then,  Must  We  Do?"  and 
"My  Confession." 

This  seems  to  indicate  that  not  all  the  articles 
and  sermons  which  followed  the  ultimate  news 
from  Russia  were  grounded  upon  first-hand 
knowledge  of  Tolstoy.  The  truth  is  that  his 
opinions  have  trickled  through  to  us  Western- 
ers In  diluted  streams.  He  is  already  a  tradition, 
and  it  is  the  habit  of  tradition  to  weaken  as  it 
spreads,  to  lose  the  effect  which  a  drinker  at  the 
sources  feels  in  their  concentration,  in  their  full 
and  proportioned  measure  of  ingredients.  Tol- 
stoy is  abroad  in  the  world;  he  has  permeated 
the  thought  of  the  best  minds  and  tinged  the 
currents  of  our  present  beliefs.  But  few  West- 
erners know  him  in  his  overwhelming  entirety. 

70 


TOLSTOY 

This  man  who  laid  open  his  whole  mind  and 
heart  with  prodigal  frankness  is  borne  westward 
on  the  winds  of  rumor  as  a  mythical  prodigy. 
The  outlines  of  his  thought  are  misty  and  waver- 
ing to  many  of  those  who  call  him  great.  He 
spared  no  pains  to  clarify  his  beliefs;  he  ex- 
pounded the  same  principle  many  times  with 
undiminished  force  and  ever  new  transparency; 
he  gave  sweeping  permission  to  the  world  to 
translate  and  print  his  books.  Yet  there  is  no 
complete  authorized  edition  of  his  works  in  any 
language,  even  in  Russian,  thanks  to  the  censors 
and  his  own  indifference  to  practical  concerns.* 
Thus  for  the  moment  a  partial  choas  has  de- 
scended upon  the  work  of  Tolstoy,  a  coherent 
luminous  body  of  work,  which  left  his  hand  as 
free  from  ambiguity  as  his  extraordinary  skill 
and  industry  could  make  it,  but  which  has  been 
scattered  in  transmission.  It  will  take  some 
years  for  his  loyal  followers  in  England  and 
America  to  give  us  a  complete  and  adequate 
translation;  and  in  spite  of  Matthew  Arnold's 
naive  confidence  in  the  French,  the  most  patient 
collator  will  have  difficulty  in  finding  Tolstoy's 
work  or  recognizing  even  the  titles,  in  the  books 
which  the  Parisian  publishers  have  sent  forth 

*This  is  no  longer  true  in  the  troubled  year  of  grace,  1922. 
Every  scrap  of  Tolstoy  is  published  in  Russia.  And  probably 
before  long  there  will  be  complete  translations  in  many 
modern  languages. 

71 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

under  his  name.  One  who  has  assembled  such 
of  his  books  as  are  procurable  in  French  and 
English  would  say  with  all  emphasis  possible: 

"Withhold  judgment  about  any  particular  be- 
lief expressed  or  supposed  to  have  been  expres- 
sed by  Tolstoy  until  you  have  read  as  many  of 
his  books  as  you  can  get — and  do  not  fail  to  read 
them."  He  is  the  one  noble  speaker  who  has 
happened  in  our  time,  "who  may  be  named  and 
stand  as  the  mark  and  acme"  of  modern  liter- 
ature. 

A  little  knowledge  of  Tolstoy  is  more  than 
proverbially  dangerous.  He  laid  his  vigorous 
hand  upon  every  problem  that  vexes  and  streng- 
thens the  soul.  His  utterance  on  each  problem 
is  intense  and  aggressive.  He  boldly  pursues  an 
an  idea  whither  it  leads,  or  drives  it  with  pas- 
sionate conviction  to  a  foreseen  conclusion,  and 
stays  not  for  the  beliefs  of  any  majority  or  min- 
ority of  men.  His  magnitude  overflows  the  ac- 
cepted area  of  such  an  adjective  as  intolerant. 
Yet  approached  for  the  first  time  by  a  reader 
accustomed  to  the  persuasive  amenities  of  other 
saints  and  sages,  he  seems  to  bristle  with  out- 
rageous denial;  some  of  his  opinions,  isolated 
from  the  rest,  stand  as  repellant  outposts,  for- 
bidding many  minds  which,  entering  from  an- 
other side,  would  go  straight  to  the  heart  of  him. 
For    example,    our    traditional    reverence    for 

72 


TOLSTOY 

Shakespeare  is  wounded  by  his  downright  state- 
ment that  Shakespeare  was  not  an  artist;  the  of- 
fended judgment  retorts  that  thereby  Tolstoy 
proves  that  he  is  himself  no  artist,  or  that  in 
crotchety  old  age  he  outgrew  the  poetry  of  his 
virile  years.  It  must  be  understood  that  the  es- 
say on  Shakespeare  is  in  the  nature  of  an  appen- 
dix to  his  essay,  'What  Is  Art?"  That  in  turn  is 
closely  related  to  his  ethical  and  social  teach- 
ings. Those  again  are  inseparably  bound  with 
his  tales  and  novels.  And  his  fiction,  finally,  is 
rooted  in  Russia  life,  not  only  because,  as  is 
obvious,  it  deals  with  Russian  people,  but  be- 
cause during  Tolstoy's  prime,  there  was,  as  we 
shall  presently  see,  an  attitude  toward  the  novel 
and  all  literary  art  which  was  peculiar  to  in- 
tellectual Russians. 

Happily  for  English  readers  the  foundation 
for  complete  understanding  of  Tolstov  has  been 
laid  by  Mr.  Aylmer  Maude  in  his  "Life,"  the 
second  volume  of  which  appeared  a  few  days 
before  his  master's  death.  Mr.  Maude  has  en- 
tire knowledge  of  his  subject  and  perfect  sympa- 
thy; he  is  a  sane  and  independent  thinker,  and 
his  work  is  admirable  for  its  balance,  its  candor, 
its  sturdy  devotion,  which,  however,  admits  no 
surrender  of  the  biographer's  private  beliefs.  To 
the  reader  who  cares  merely  for  an  interesting 
story  Tolstoy's  career  offers  more  than  that  of 

73 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

most  men  of  letters.  It  is  laid  amid  the  plots  and 
counterplots  of  bloody  Russia,  the  most  melo- 
dramatic background  of  modern  history.  The 
man  is  spectacular,  compelling,  in  all  violation 
of  his  own  doctrines  of  self-abasement.  The 
peasant's  smock,  which  he  wore  as  symbol  of  his 
unity  with  common  man,  served  only  to  make 
him  the  more  picturesque.  This  ascetic  relig- 
ious philosopher  was  a  master  of  thrilling  war 
stories.  He  knew  equally  well  the  heart  of  a 
lady  in  the  high  life  of  Moscow,  and  the  soul 
of  a  peasant  woman.  He  was  of  athletic  stature, 
and  his  huge  hand  was  sensitive  to  the  finger 
tips;  with  it  he  gripped  a  scythe,  played  the 
piano,  wrote  a  tirade  against  modern  music,  and 
indited  an  exposition  of  the  gospel  of  love  which 
estranged  some  of  his  best  friends!  It  is  no 
wonder  that  his  fiction  bears  the  seal  of  reality, 
that  it  has  the  abundance,  the  variety,  the  jost- 
ling contrasts  of  life  itself. 

II. 

In  Russia  prose  fiction  has  been  for  a 
century  the  vehicle  of  the  soberest  reflections 
upon  contemporary  problems.  It  was  danger- 
ous for  a  Russian  radical  to  express  his  beliefs 
directly  in  essays  and  expositions;  what  he  was 
not  allowed  to  utter  in  editorial  and  parliamen- 
tary debate  he  set  forth  indirectly  through  the 

74 


TOLSTOY 

novel,  which  thus  became  a  sort  of  realistic  par- 
able. Suppression  increased  his  emotional  in- 
tensity. Feeling  himself  a  member  of  a  down- 
trodden class,  he  became  the  champion  of  other 
down-trodden  classes.  When  Tolstoy  began  to 
write,  the  novel  was  already  a  tempered  weapon 
against  abuse,  the  skilful  handling  of  it  was  a 
tradition  among  the  literati,  and  there  were  mas- 
ters to  coach  and  encourage  the  beginner.  The 
Russian  novel  records  the  deepest  motives  of 
Russian  history.  Tourgenef  voiced  the  philo- 
sophic resignation  and  scepticism  of  the  educated 
Russian  and  the  evils  of  serfdom.  Tolstoy  por- 
trayed the  vices  of  the  educated  Russian  and  the 
evils  of  wage-slavery  which  followed  the  eman- 
cipation of  the  serfs.  Russian  fiction  is  great, 
because  it  treats  the  gravest  struggles  of 
life  and  because  its  authors  have  trained  them- 
selves in  the  art  of  expounding  ideas  in  the 
form  of  fiction  without  transgressing  the  laws 
of  narrative;  they  have  learned  to  be  the 
mouthpiece  of  life  and  to  let  life  preach 
the  sermons.  To  Tolstoy  and  other  Russians  the 
greatest  American  book  is  "Uncle  Tom's  Cab- 
in," because  it  is  the  chronicle  of  a  bleeding  is- 
sue; I  have  seen  many  references  to  that  book 
by  Russian  writers  but  scarcely  a  mention  of 
Hawthorne. 
Mr.  Maude  quotes  a  letter  to  Tolstoy  from 

75 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Drouzhinin,  critic,  novelist,  and  translator  of 
Shakespeare:  "An  Englishman  or  an  Amer- 
ican," he  says,  "may  laugh  at  the  fact  that  in 
Russia  not  merely  men  of  thirty,  but  gray-hair- 
ed owners  of  2,000  serfs  sweat  over  stories  of  a 
hundred  pages,  which  appear  in  the  magazines, 
are  devoured  by  everybody,  and  arouse  discus- 
sion in  society  for  a  whole  day.  However  much 
artistic  quality  may  have  to  do  with  this  result, 
you  cannot  explain  it  merely  by  art.  What  in 
other  lands  is  a  matter  of  idle  talk  and  careless 
dilettantism,  with  us  is  quite  another  affair. 
Among  us  things  have  taken  such  shape  that  a 
story — the  most  frivolous  and  insignificant  form 
of  literature — becomes  one  of  two  things :  either 
it  is  rubbish,  or  else  it  is  the  voice  of  a  leader 
sounding  through  the  empire." 

Tolstoy's  realism  is,  then,  the  result  both  of 
his  own  temperamental  passion  for  truth  and  of 
a  theory  of  art  which  prevailed  in  his  literary 
circle.  There  were,  to  be  sure,  silly  novelists 
in  Russia;  there,  as  everywhere,  only  the  best 
minds  regarded  fiction  as  a  vital  matter.  But 
there  were  enough  such  serious  minds  to  wel- 
come Tolstoy  and  encourage  him.  Nekrasof, 
editor  of  The  Contemporary,  found  in  Tolstoy's 
first  work,  "the  truth — the  truth,  of  which,  since 
Gogol's  death,  so  little  has  remained  in  Russian 
literature."    Tourgenef  repeatedly  called  Tol- 

76 


TOLSTOY 

stoy  the  greatest  of  Russians,  and  on  his  death- 
bed pencilled  the  pathetic  letter  in  which  he 
pleaded  with  Tolstoy  to  return  to  his  art.  *'I  am 
glad,"  he  said,  "to  have  been  your  contempor- 
ary." Had  he  lived  sixteen  years  longer,  "Re- 
surrection" might  have  made  him  happy. 

In  Tolstoy's  discourses  on  religion  appear 
many  times  the  words  "sense  of  life" — religion 
is  the  sense  of  life,  the  principle  upon  which  the 
details  of  the  moral  world  are  ordered  and  by 
which  they  are  to  be  interpreted.  In  a  slightly 
different  meaning  "the  sense  of  life"  expresses 
the  total  effect  of  Tolstoy's  fiction.  He  wrote  to 
a  young  disciple:  "Do  not  bend  to  your  purpose 
the  events  in  the  story,  but  follow  them  wher- 
ever they  lead  you.  .  .  .  Lack  of  symmetry 
and  the  apparent  haphazardness  of  events  is 
a  chief  sign  of  life." 

In  "War  and  Peace"  and  "Anna  Karenina" 
there  are  many  plots.  The  unity  is  that  of  the 
loose-jointed  English  novel  rather  than  that  of 
the  French,  which  travels  on  a  straight  track. 
Tolstoy's  stories  move  like  a  river  with  many 
tributaries;  he  explores  now  one,  now  another 
of  the  branch  streams,  but  the  course  of  the  main 
current  is  continuous,  and  runs  in  one  general 
direction,  as  if  the  slope  of  the  country  had  been 
determined  before  the  recorder  came  upon  the 
scene  to  measure  and  report. 

77 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

"War  and  Peace"  is  greater  than  a  novel;  it  is 
an  epic,  it  is  nation-wide  and  long  as  the  growth 
from  childhood  to  maturity.  We  see  from 
a  peak  of  the  face  of  eastern  Europe  and  the 
swarming  of  peoples  and  armies.  The  sensation 
of  vastness,  of  humanity  surging  and  flowing  in 
obedience  to  obscure  collective  interests  is  pro- 
duced by  only  one  other  modern  book  that  I 
know,  Hardy's  "The  Dynasts."  From  the  high 
pinnacles  of  omniscience  the  imagination  de- 
scends by  swift  unperceived  transitions  to  the  in- 
timacies of  a  house  in  Moscow — to  the  heart  of 
the  girl  Natacha — to  the  mind  of  Pierre  satu- 
rated with  alcohol  plotting  to  assassinate  Napo- 
leon. The  adventures  and  purposes  of  the  char- 
acters cross  and  conflict,  interweave  and  unite, 
but  each  goes  as  it  must  and  there  is  no  con- 
fusion in  the  telling. 

In  ''Anna  Karenina,"  the  story  of  Levin  is 
but  loosely  related  to  the  principal  tragedy,  and 
the  story  of  Levin's  brother  is  an  excursion  from 
the  highway  of  Levin's  career.  One  can  see  that 
after  the  book  is  done.  During  its  course  the 
reader  has  no  sense  that  any  part  is  not  precise- 
ly placed.  The  illusion  of  inevitability  is  per- 
fect. Levin's  brother  is  related  to  him  by 
natural  ties  in  life;  it  is  natural,  then,  that  he 
should  appear  in  Levin's  story. 

The  illusion  of  inevitability  springs  from  Tol- 

78 


TOLSTOY 

stoy's  all-encircling  comprehension  of  events, 
from  his  justice  to  each  character  and  from  his 
extraordinary  physical  vividness.  He  writes 
with  his  five  senses.  A  critic  warned  him  early 
that  he  was  in  danger  of  making  a  man's  thigh 
feel  like  going  on  a  journey  to  India. 

But  his  recognition  of  physical  sensations  and 
his  power  to  convey  them  (they  traverse  bodily 
the  stylistic  obstacles  of  translation)  take  the 
story  off  the  flat  page  and  give  it  three  dimen- 
sional reality.  The  acrid  smell  of  an  old  man's 
breath,  the  coldness  of  a  man's  hand  when  he  is 
in  mental  distress,  the  cracking  of  Karenin's 
knuckles  when  he  clasps  his  hands  in  moral 
satisfaction  or  the  anguish  of  wounded  pride — 
such  details  cling  to  the  mind,  and  the  memory 
of  them  recalls  the  whole  story. 

Tolstoy's  conception  of  human  character  is  at 
once  relentlessly  analytic  and  profoundly  piti- 
ful and  kind.  The  whole  content  of  his  thought 
from  its  bold  surface  to  its  deepest  depth  is  in- 
stinct with  compassion.  Once  when  he  was 
walking  with  Tourgenef  they  came  to  an  old 
broken-down  horse  in  a  pasture.  Tolstoy  went 
up  to  it,  stroked  it,  and  uttered  its  thoughts  and 
sufferings  with  such  moving  tenderness  that 
Tourgenef  cried:  "You  must  once  have  been  a 
horse  yourself." 

In  "Master  and  Man,"  a  beautiful  story  of 

79 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

two  men  lost  in  a  snowstorm,  the  horse  is  a 
third  character — an  animal  character,  be  it  un- 
derstood, for  Tolstoy  is  antipodal  to  nature-fak- 
ing. He  has  confidence  that  nature  and  man 
will  tell  their  own  story  and  disclose  their  in- 
herent lessons.  Dogmatic  and  uncompromising 
in  his  private  ethical  beliefs,  he  never  sacrifices 
humanity  even  upon  the  altars  where  he  tried 
to  immolate  himself.  Valid  morality  springs 
spontaneously  from  his  narrative,  and  is  there- 
by a  hundredfold  more  impressive  than  teach- 
ings forced  from  artificially  moulded  events. 
Even  in  his  rewriting  of  traditional  myths  and 
parables  he  restores  inorganic  sermons  to  life, 
creates  a  living  thing  in  which  the  ethical  in- 
tention is  assimilated  and  vitalized.  He  told 
these  stories  to  the  peasants,  listened  with  de- 
light to  their  retelling  of  them,  and  incorporat- 
ed their  racial  turns  of  phrase.  To  an  old  peasant 
woman  with  a  native  gift  for  narrative,  he  said: 
"You  are  a  real  master,  Anisya;  thank  you  for 
teaching  me  to  speak  Russian  and  to  think  Rus- 
sian." 

He  learned  from  life  and  he  trusted  life  to 
teach  the  reader.  Anna  Karenina  commits  suic- 
ide, not  because  she  is  a  naughty  woman  whom 
the  novelist  as  guardian  of  morals  must  punish 
for  the  satisfaction  of  a  virtuous  world,  but  be- 
cause the  society  that  surrounds  her,  the  every- 

80 


TOLSTOY 

day  life  of  visiting  and  tea-drinking,  inexorably 
forbids  her  to  be  happy.  Tolstoy  is  a  champion 
of  the  poor,  and  he  began  his  career  at  a  time 
when,  as  Mr.  Cahan  tells  us,  "the  idealization 
of  the  peasant"  was  one  of  the  staple  phrases  in 
essays  and  editorials.  But  in  Tolstoy's  stories 
there  is  no  false  sublimation  of  the  peasant.  He 
does  not  cry,  like  Dickens,  or  the  profession- 
al charity-monger:  "Pity  these  poor  starved 
brothers."  He  simply  recites  their  lives.  Some- 
times he  chronicles  the  most  terrible  things  in 
a  grim  restrained  matter-of-fact  tone,  more  mov- 
ing than  any  passionate  appeal  to  the  reader's 
sympathy.  He  is,  of  course,  a  master  of  argu- 
ment and  exhortation,  but  all  that  is  found  in 
his  other  books,  not  in  his  fiction. 

A  critic,  whose  democracy  is  too  narrowly 
partisan,  complains  that  in  "War  and  Peace" 
all  the  important  characters  are  aristocrats,  and 
that  the  story  fails  to  reveal  the  motives  of  the 
people,  of  those  inarticulate  millions  who  Tol- 
stoy himself  says  are  the  real  makers  of  history. 
But  this  apparent  fault  is  an  instance  of  Tol- 
stoy's integrity.  When  he  wrote  "War  and 
Peace"  he  knew  only  aristocrats,  or  was  chiefly 
interested  in  them..  He  had  already  begun  to 
discern  the  relations  between  the  multitude  and 
the  leaders  whom  history  signalizes;  but  he  had 
not  lived  close  to  peasants  and  workmen ;  he  had 

8i 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

approached  them  as  lord  and  master,  not  yet  as 
brother  and  interpreter.  Moreover,  if  there  be 
a  moral  hero  in  "War  and  Peace"  whom  the 
author  seems  to  favor,  it  is  Karataief,  the  illiter- 
ate soldier,  whose  simple  faith  dawns  as  a  re- 
generative light  upon  Pierre,  a  rich  man  of  the 
world  who  has  met  all  philosophies  and  found 
them  heartless. 

Tolstoy  could  not  write  what  he  did  not  know 
or  did  not  feel.  His  stories,  though  not  autobio- 
graphic in  the  usual  sense  of  the  world,  are  the 
quintessence  of  his  adventures  and  experiences, 
accurately  recalled  and  profoundly  meditated. 
When  the  manuscript  of  the  "Kreutzer  Sonata" 
was  read  in  his  house  to  a  company  of  friends, 
Tolstoy  said  in  answer  to  some  objections : 

"In  a  work  of  art  it  is  indispensable  that  the 
artist  should  have  something  new,  of  his  own.  It 
is  not  how  it  is  written  that  really  matters.  Peo- 
ple will  read  the  'Kreutzer  Sonata'  and  say,  *Ah, 
that  is  the  way  to  write!'  The  indispensable 
thing  is  to  go  beyond  what  others  have  done,  to 
pick  off  even  a  very  small  fresh  bit.  But  it  won't 
do  to  be  like  my  friend  Fet,  who  at  sixteen  wrote, 
*The  spring  bubbles,  the  moon  shines,  and  she 
loves  me,'  and  who  went  on  writing  and  writ- 
ing, and  at  sixty  wrote:  'She  loves  me,  and  the 
spring  bubbles,  and  the  moon  shines.'  " 

It  was  impossible  for  Tolstoy,  the  novelist,  to 

82 


TOLSTOY 

write  of  people  whom  he  did  not  know,  merely 
because  he  happened  to  have  sympathy  with 
some  of  their  ideals  and  habits.  It  was  impos- 
sible for  him  to  violate  human  nature  when  he 
portrayed  characters  that  he  did  know.  Hating 
professional  psychology  and  all  other  sciences 
and  quasi-sciences,  he  is  the  greatest  of  so-called 
psychological  novelists;  his  psychology  was 
made  before  text-books,  and  it  used  to  be  called 
"truth  to  human  nature."  You  cannot  suggest, 
as  you  read  a  novel  by  Tolstoy,  anything  a  char- 
acter ought  have  done  which  was  not  done,  any 
emotion  he  should  have  felt  which  Tolstoy  has 
not  suggested  at  exactly  the  right  moment.  He 
penetrates  the  characters  of  living  men  and  the 
characters  of  history  and  romance.  The  pseudo- 
psychology  of  the  critics  of  "Hamlet,"  does  not 
deceive  him.  Napoleon,  mythical  monster  and 
genius  unapproachable,  fails  to  over-awe  him; 
Tolstoy  draws  him,  man  size,  amid  events  that 
dwarf  heroes. 

In  "Resurrection,"  Nekhludof  is  represented 
as  holding  social  theories  which  in  point  of  fact 
Tolstoy  held.  Nekhludof  reads  Henry  George 
and  tries  to  give  his  land  to  the  peasants  as  com- 
munal property.  Tolstoy,  the  social  reformer, 
would  admit  no  obstacle  to  the  justice  and  the 
practicability  of  the  plan;  a  lesser  artist  would 
have  yielded  to  the  reformer,  the  plan  would 

83 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

have  worked  and  the  story  would  have  proved 
the  theory.  But  Tolstoy,  the  novelist,  confronts 
Nekhludof  with  the  suspicion,  the  ignorant 
shrewdness  of  the  peasants;  the  plan  encounters 
all  the  difficulties,  legal  and  psychological, 
which  life  would  offer. 

"Resurrection"  is  the  crowning  proof  of  Tol- 
stoy's artistic  power.  For  twenty  years  he  had 
developed  theories  about  every  problem  of  life; 
he  held  his  opinions  tenaciously;  hugging  them 
in  resolute  defiance  he  strode  roughshod  through 
the  domains  of  church,  state  and  family.  His 
convictions  were  strong  enough  to  silence  him 
as  an  artist,  and  for  years  he  obeyed  the  man- 
date of  conscience  that  forbade  him  to  write 
novels  at  all.  But  when,  to  raise  money  for  the 
Doukhobors,  he  consented  to  write  "Resurrec- 
tion," his  artistic  sense  was  stronger  than  the  rest 
of  him  (if,  indeed,  there  was  any  antagonism 
between  the  two  sides  of  his  nature),  and  theor- 
ies powerful  enough  to  disrupt  the  universe 
were  kept  in  bounds  by  his  sense  of  proportion, 

his  sense  of  life. 

The  feeling  that  Tolstoy,  the  artist,  and  Tol- 
stoy, the  reformer,  are  in  any  true  sense  engaged 
in  struggle  is  largely  due  to  the  false  dialectic 
of  traditional  criticism,  which  he  by  precept  and 
practice  has  confuted.  His  great  moral  prin- 
ciples are  the  sure  foundation  of  his  greatness 

84 


TOLSTOY 

in  art.  For  us  Westerners  modern  realism — • 
Hardy  and  Zola  come  first  to  mind — is  associ- 
ated with  a  godless  though  very  humane  sceptic- 
ism. Religious  sentiment  has  been  left  in  the 
weak  hands  of  romance,  and  the  longer  it  has 
been  left  there  the  more  false  it  has  become. 
From  the  beginning,  even  before  his  religious 
conversion,  Tolstoy  had  a  sound  ethical  outlook. 
At  the  age  of  forty  he  wrote  of  Tourgenef's 
"Smoke":  "The  strength  of  poetry  lies  in  love, 
and  the  direction  of  that  strength  depends  on 
character.  Without  strength  of  love  there  is  no 
poetry.  In  'Smoke'  there  is  hardly  any  love  of 
anything  and  very  little  poetry.  There  is  only 
love  of  a  light  and  playful  adultery,  and  there- 
fore the  poetry  of  that  novel  is  repulsive."  The 
spirit  in  that  criticism  is  the  guiding  spirit  in 
"Anna  Karenina,"  and  it  is  the  same  spirit 
which  dictated  this  passage  in  the  magnificent 
sermon  on  the  Russian-Japanese  war:  "The 
great  struggle  of  our  time  ...  is  not  the 
struggle  in  which  men  engage  with  mines, 
bombs  and  bullets;  it  is  the  spiritual  struggle 
which  goes  on  incessantly,  which  is  going  on 
now,  between  the  enlightened  conscience  of 
humanity,  about  to  be  made  manifest,  and  the 
shadows  and  oppression  which  surround  it  and 
crush  it." 

8s 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

III. 

To  western  liberals  Tolstoy's  assaults  on 
church  and  state  seem  too  vehement,  partly  be- 
cause the  tyranny  he  attacked  is  more  obviously 
brutal  than  that  from  which  we  suffer,  partly 
because  we  are  complacently  blind  to  facts 
which  he  revealed,  facts  which  are  present  at 
our  doors.  Our  mild  meliorations  delude  us. 
We  wave  an  idle  hand  and  say:  "Ah,  yes,  Rus- 
sia is  a  savage  country,  but  we  are  not  like 
that."*  And  all  the  while  the  coldest  labor 
statistics,  if  we  dared  to  open  them,  show  that 
in  the  exploitation  of  workmen,  women  and 
children,  ours  is  as  barbarous  a  country  as  any 
in  the  world.  Our  horrors  and  injustices  are 
smoothed  over  by  a  disingenuous  press,  which 
is  owned  or  indirectly  controlled  by  the  powers 
that  be.  American  philanthropy  steals  with  one 
hand  and  builds  universities  with  the  other.  We 
have  no  kings  and  no  dukes,  but  America  is  the 
sport  of  capital;  it  lies  abjectly  prostrate  before 
a  power-drunk  bourgeoisie.  We  celebrate  Tol- 
stoy in  harmless  little  magazine  articles  and 
wear  shirts  woven  by  children.  We  think  we 
need  no  school  like  the  one  Tolstoy  conducted 
for  poor,  backward  Russian  peasants,  because 
we  have  our  public  schools  and  compulsory  edu- 
cation   laws — in    some    states.      Hundreds    of 

♦And  we  are  still  saying  it,  1922! 

86 


TOLSTOY 

our  children  are  at  work;  they  have  succeeded, 
thanks  to  the  glorious  free  competition  of  busi- 
ness, in  taking  their  fathers'  places  at  the  ma- 
chines. The  children  that  are  in  school  wave 
the  flag  and  read  about  George  Washington. 

Tolstoy's  teachings  can  not  at  present  shake 
the  somnolent  conscience  of  America.  He  be- 
lieved in  his  innocence  that  our  industrial  mas- 
ters have  reached  the  outrageous  limits  of  ex- 
ploitation, and  that  America  must  be  the  first 
country  to  rise  and  throw  oflf  its  parasites.  But 
that  is  a  foreigner's  opinion  and  not  to  be  taken 
seriously  in  the  land  of  the  free  and  the  home  of 
the  National  Civic  Federation.  His  indictment 
of  our  civilization  is  only  nine-tenths  true,  and 
we  shall  take  advantage  of  the  one-tenth  that  is 
overstatement  to  throw  his  indictment  out  of 
court.  He  sees  that  every  government  is  a  com- 
mercial agency  by  means  of  which  a  privileged 
minority  conducts  its  business  at  the  expense  of 
the  majority.  We  are  ashamed  to  believe  that  that 
can  be  true  of  our  Congress  and  our  irreproach- 
able Supreme  Court.  It  is  easier  to  dismiss  Tol- 
stoy, because  he  is  "eccentric"  and  ''goes  too 
far."  Did  he  not  sweepingly  assert  that  there  is 
no  such  thing  as  a  virtuous  statesman?  That 
absurdity  permits  us  to  ignore  the  book  in  which 
it  appears. 

Besides,    it    is    more    "optimistic"    to    read 

87 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

articles  about  the  ''history  of  achievement 
in  the  United  States,"  to  take  democratic  short 
cuts  to  superficial  knowledge,  than  to  read  dis- 
concerting books.  Our  healthy-minded  .'confi- 
dence in  American  morals  bids  us  be  content 
with  a  little  gossip  about  Carlyle  and  his  wife, 
and  not  trouble  ourselves  with  such  a  difficult 
book  as  *Tast  and  Present."  In  like  fashion  we 
shall  understand  Tolstoy's  ideals  without  read- 
ing "What,  Then,  Must  We  Do?"  or  "The 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  Is  Within  You."  Sufficient 
for  us  a  few  newspaper  discussions  about  "Why 
Tolstoy  Left  the  Countess  and  the  Relations  Be- 
tween Family  Life  and  Anarchism."  For  Tol- 
stoy was  an  anarchist,  and  that  disposes  of  him! 
We  know  all  about  anarchists;  they  live  in  Pat- 
erson,  N.  J.,  and  in  the  imaginations  of  journal- 
ists, home  secretaries,  and  framers  of  immigra- 
tion laws. 

Yet  despite  our  republican  wisdom,  we  can- 
not quite  understand  Tolstoy  until  we  know  the 
true  meanings  of  such  words  as  labor,  capital, 
exploitation,  rent,  property,  interest,  and  pro- 
letariat. In  Russia  these  words  are  understood 
by  many  people,  also  in  Germany.  But  we 
Americans,  though  highly  cultivated,  are  not 
well  informed  about  contemporaryi  facts  and 
current  philosophies.  We  have  still  to  be  taught 
that  the  Russian  revolution  is  our  revolution, 

88 


TOLSTOY 

that  it  is  part  of  a  mighty  economic  change 
which  is  in  process  all  over  the  world.  A  study 
of  Tolstoy  and  his  critics  will  help  to  instruct 
us — some  day — about  these  momentous  re- 
lations. 

The  present  status  of  the  revolution  is  more 
confused  in  Russia  than  in  any  other  country.* 
The  repressive  measures  of  the  government 
forced  a  temporary  alliance  between  all 
types  of  revolutionaries.  It  was  this  alliance 
which  isolated  Tolstoy  from  other  reformers 
and  made  him  a  retarding  force,  almost  a  reac- 
tionary, against  the  progress  of  the  Social  De- 
mocracy, that  party  of  orderly  Marxians  under 
German  tutelage  which  was  the  hope  of  young 
Russia.  The  Czar's  government,  which  was  no 
respecter  of  principles,  grouped  him  with  all 
the  malcontents  and  libertarians.  And  he  re- 
turned the  compliment.  Because  he  despised 
all  economics,  he  could  not  join  a  "scientific" 
party.  Failing  to  distinguish  between  the  peace- 
ful and  the  militant  revolutionists,  he  charged 
them  all  with  murder  and  grouped  them  with 
the  government.  And  thus  he  stood  alone,  dis- 
trustful of  peaceful  anarchists  because  they 
were  not  religious,  and  distrustful  of  most  re- 

*This  refers,  of  course,  to  the  revolution  before  the  Great 
War.  I  wonder  now,  1922.  just  what  Lenin,  Trotsky,  Chicher- 
in.  et.al.  think  of  Tolstoy,  and  what  he  would  have  thought 
of  them  I 

89 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ligions  because  they  were  organized  on  a  prop- 
erty basis.  He  stood  alone.  Yet  all  liberal  men, 
antithetical  to  each  other  as  are  the  socialists 
and  the  anarchists,  united  in  loving  him  as  they 
united  in  hatred  of  the  government.  They  ap- 
plauded his  terrific  indictment  of  the  society 
under  which  we  live,  though  they  disagreed 
from  various  points  of  view  with  his  solution. 
It  was  said  of  him  on  his  eightieth  birthday  that 
whatever  conflict  there  might  be  between  his  be- 
liefs and  those  of  other  reformers,  the  foes  of 
liberty  were  his  foes  and  the  friends  of  liberty 
were  his  friends. 

Tolstoy's  solution  for  our  ills  is  Christian  an- 
archy, a  voluntary  communism  allied  with  the 
teachings  of  Jesus,  or  with  Tolstoy's  interpre- 
tation of  them.  He  taught  that  all  violence  is 
wrong,  all  government  is  robbery,  and  that  the 
only  possible  moral  order  is  founded  on  love  of 
man  and  renunciation  of  legal  rights.  That  he 
should  have  been  a  champion  of  Henry  George- 
ism,  a  plan  that  depends  on  organized  govern- 
ment, is  one  of  his  many  inconsistencies;  what 
drew  him  to  the  single-tax  theory  was  prob- 
ably not  so  much  the  economic  principles  as 
George's  arraignment  of  landlordism. 

It  is  Tolstoy's  own  arraignment  of  our  so- 
called  civilization  rather  than  his  proposed  rem- 
edies which  will  quicken  the  conscience  of  the 

90 


TOLSTOY 

world.*  His  individualism,  his  doctrine  of  pri- 
vate goodness,  looks  backward  and  not  forward. 
He  is,  like  Carlyle,  the  voice  of  a  bygone  time. 
He  had  lived  through  the  failures  of  many 
political  revolutions,  and  he  abhorred  anything 
that  pretended  to  be  scientific.  He  turned  his 
eyes  from  the  science  of  men  to  their  souls.  In 
his  magnificent  self  he  justified  his  individual- 
ism, but  were  we  a  billion  Tolstoys,  saintly  and 
self-disciplined,  we  must  work  in  organization, 
or  we  cannot  work  effectively.  The  world  is  re- 
ligious, but  religion  is  a  matter  of  opinion.  The 
world  is  also  economic,  and  economics  is  not  a 
matter  of  opinion,  but  of  unavoidable  facts  over 
which  the  individual  has  little  control.**  Like 
Ruskin,  Tolstoy  rejected  economics  because 
most  professorial  economists  do  not  tell  the 
truth.  He  blamed  the  dismal  science  for  the 
dismal  facts  and  for  the  inadequacies  of  its 
classic  expounders.  Had  he  understood  the 
economic  structure  of  society  (which  nobody 
does  understand),  he  would  have  seen  the  futil- 
ity of  trying  to  abandon  his  estates.  His  singu- 
lar abnegation  could  not  put  an  end  to  the  evils 
of  landlordism,  even  to  the  extent  of  his  own 
plot  of  ground.  He  could  not  make  the  burden 

♦Will  it?    I  am  not  so  confident  as  I  was  once. 
♦♦That  sounds   like  good  sense.    Some  of  Tolstoy's   coun- 
trymen at  Genoa  seem  to  have  proved  it. 

91 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

of  landless  people  one  ounce  lighter  by  dis- 
mounting in  his  own  person  from  their  backs. 
Nothing  can  be  done  until  an  effective  majority 
of  men  agree  to  abolish  private  ownership  of 
land  and  establish  communal  ownership. 

Tolstoy  preached  with  splendid  fervor  the 
power  of  the  individual  soul.  But  his  prac- 
tice is  proof  of  our  impotent  severalty.  It  was 
disorganization  that  caused  the  famine  which 
he  labored  to  relieve,  and  it  was  his  efficient 
organization  that  kept  the  hungry  from  starv- 
ing. That  our  greatest  man  of  letters  should 
sweat  behind  a  prehistoric  plow  is  good  for 
his  soul  and  for  ours;  but,  even  if  we  should 
all  grow  perfect  in  spirit  and  eager, for  our  share 
of  manual  labor,  we  should  still  feed  ourselves 
better  by  communial  use  of  steam  plows.  Tol- 
stoy's belated  Proudhonism  is  not  the  solution 
for  the  evils  of  property.  It  is  his  negative 
teaching  that  has  positive  value.  He  is  an 
abolitionist,  not  a  constructive  philosopher.  But 
to  say  that  is  not  to  answer  him,  not  to  deny  him. 
He  remains  unanswered  as  long  as  the  labor  of 
this  world  is  done  at  the  behest  of  the  few  and 
for  their  profit.  His  work  is  not  done,  his  books 
cannot  be  outgrown,  until  every  man  of  us  looks 
at  the  facts  honestly  and  cries  with  him:  "It  is 
impossible  to  live  so !    It  is  impossible  to  live  so  I" 

92 


MAETERLINCK'S  ESSAYS 


MAETERLINCK'S  ESSAYS 

If  we  had  to  lose  one  part  or  the  other  of 
Maeterlinck's  work,  I  think  we  should  less  re- 
luctantly surrender  the  plays  than  the  essays. 
The  essays  are  richer  in  substance  than  the 
dramas  and  they  are  as  truly  poetic.  The  sunny 
garden,  where  the  poet  lives  with  his  bees  and 
flowers,  is  a  more  splendid  domain  than  moon- 
lit psuedo-medi^val  empires,  peopled  with  the 
wraiths  of  women.  And  the  little  bull-pup  of 
the  essay  is  a  truer  dog  than  the  one  in  "The 
Blue  Bird." 

Some  years  ago,  when  the  essay  on  the  dog 
was  first  published  in  English,  I  read  it  aloud 
to  a  woman  who  owned  a  Boston  terrier,  and  I 
gave  it  to  a  professional  breeder  of  dogs.  Both 
liked  it.  It  is  an  essay  that  any  one  can  under- 
stand; it  illuminates  a  ground  where  all  kinds  of 
people  meet.  Even  Bill  Sikes  would  have  liked 
it.  Maeterlinck  says  what  almost  everybody 
thinks,  and  says  it  as  it  has  not  been  said  before, 
not  in  "Rab  and  His  Friends."  The  simple  elo- 
quence, the  sincerity,  the  afTfectionate  humor  are 
the  positive  virtues  of  the  essay;  and  its  negative 

95 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

virtue  is  freedom  from  a  kind  of  rhetorical  arti- 
ficiality in  which  Maeterlinck  indulges  when  he 
gets  away  from  the  solid  realities  of  life. 

Maeterlinck  is  an  amateur  botanist  and  bee- 
keeper and  a  professional  poet.  He  knows,  or 
seems  to  know,  the  facts,  and  he  sees  them  with 
an  imaginative  vision,  wondering  at  them  like 
a  child,  in  the  very  act  of  giving  quite  lucid 
"scientific"  explanations.  He  hovers  often  on 
the  enchanted  borderland  between  knowledge 
and  fancy,  and  plays  to  and  fro  between  regions 
which,  though  adjacent  parts  of  the  same  uni- 
verse, have  different  habits  of  thought.  I  am 
acquainted  with  an  American  poet  and  philoso- 
pher who  does  not  know  the  common  kinds  of 
dogs  such  as  any  boy  of  ten  knows.  I  also  knew 
and  argued  with  an  eminent  biologist  who  ob- 
jected to  Maeterlinck's  "Life  of  the  Bee,"  on 
the  ground  that  the  poetic  phrasing  falsified  the 
facts.  True,  he  conceded,  the  queen-bee  does  fly 
and  the  strongest  male  overtakes  and  fertilizes 
her.  But  for  Maeterlinck  to  poetize  the  fact  as 
a  "nuptial  flight"  seemed  to  the  man  of  science 
not  only  untruth  to  nature,  but  a  blasphemy 
against  the  sacred  love  of  man  and  woman. 

My  friend,  the  biologist,  and  my  acquaint- 
ance, the  American  poet  and  philosopher,  both 
seem  to  be  unfortunately  incomplete  human  be- 
ings. The  poet  and  philosopher  does  not  know 

96 


MAETERLINCK'S  ESSAYS 

what  any  duffer  knows,  what  anybody  who  cares 
not  only  for  animals  but  for  ordinary  folks  that 
own  dogs  cannot  refrain  from  knowing.  He  is 
a  man  of  cosmopolitan  experience  and  has  sure- 
ly been  in  the  Bois  more  than  once.  In  the 
Garden  of  Acclimatation  is  a  wonderful  ken- 
nel ;  there  are  at  least  fifteen  kinds  of  dogs,  each 
with  his  specific  or  sub-specific  name  hung  on 
his  cage.  If  you  had  never  seen  a  dog  you  could 
not  walk  about  that  kennel  five  minutes  with- 
out learning  the  names  of  a  half-dozen  varieties 
(and  without  discovering  in  yourself  a  highly 
moral  desire  to  steal  one  or  two  of  those  beauti- 
fully kept  beasts).  Some  ignorance  is  unpardon- 
able, and  some  philosophy  and  some  poetry 
would  be  more  vital  for  a  little  plain  back-yard 
knowledge.  On  the  other  hand,  what  a  pity  it 
is  that  any  man's  sense  of  fact  should  be  so 
strait  as  to  forbid  entrance  to  his  soul  of  a  honey 
bee  which  Maeterlinck  sends  forth  equipped 
with  these  georgeous  unentomological  wings  of 
words:  "The  yellow  fairies  of  the  honey."  It's 
as  bad  as  a  democrat  who  should  object  to  the 
phrase  *'queen-bee." 

Maeterlinck  has  knowledge  of  nature,  not 
only  such  knowledge  as  Wordsworth  had,  but 
a  fair  acquaintance  with  contemporaneous 
science.  He  has  learned  lessons  from  Fabre, 
whom  he  admires.  He  has  studied  his  own  gar- 

97 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

den  in  the  light  of  what  botanists  have  told  him 
and  in  the  other  light,  which  is  not  hostile  to 
botany,  but  is  different,  the  light  of  poetry.  He 
loves  to  speculate  about  unsettled  questions. 
And  his  speculations  have  a  very  great  intellec- 
tual merit.  He  is,  on  the  whole,  content  to  be 
uncertain  about  uncertain  things  and  to  express 
his  inclinations  toward  one  or  another  conclus- 
ion in  a  persuasive,  wistful  manner.  Like  many 
other  poets,  he  leans  toward  the  belief  that  na- 
ture, which  includes  us,  knows  more  than  we  do, 
and  that  to  ascribe  intelligence,  in  a  restricting 
way,  to  man  alone  is  probably  to  leave  out  a  goo'd 
deal  of  the  magic  of  growing  things,  and  to 
omit  some  potential  explanations  of  their  mys- 
tery, their  mystery  in  the  poet's  sense  and  in  the 
stern  truth  seeker's  sense.  The  essay  on  "The 
Intelligence  of  Flowers"  revivifies  the  old  moot 
question  about  what  knowledge  is,  what  instinct 
is.  It's  a  very  fine  question,  and  it  becomes  hot- 
test when  the  men  of  imagination  and  the  men 
of  science  (happily  they  are  not  mutually  ex- 
clusive) argue  about  whether  a  dog  knows  that 
he  loves  you.  A  British  poet  began  a  verse  to  a 
dog: 

The  curate  says  you  have  no  soul — 
I  know  that  he  has  none. 

That  is  good ;  but  it  is  spiteful.  Let  us  admit 
ine  curate.  For  the  dog  would.  A  dog  does  not 
care  a  wag  of  his  tail  whether  a  man  is  curate 

98 


MAETERLINCK'S  ESSAYS 

or  editor  of  a  newspaper.  Therein  the  dog  is 
our  superior. 

Maeterlinck,  though  overtaken  by  the  wan 
aoubt  of  our  times,  is  a  true  believer  in  other 
kinds  of  intelligence  than  ours.  He  holds  that 
"nature,  when  she  wishes  to  be  beautiful,  to 
please,  to  delight  and  to  prove  herself  happy, 
does  almost  what  we  should  do  had  we  her  treas- 
ures at  our  disposal."  There,  you  see,  he  begs 
the  whole  question  and  ascribes  to  "nature" 
wishes,  desires,  intentions.  He  does  the  trick 
that  poets  always  do;  he  answers  the  question 
that  he  asks  and  that  he  pretends  to  be  discuss- 
ing. "All  that  we  observe  within  ourselves,"  he 
says,  "is  rightly  open  to  suspicion ;  we  are  at 
once  litigant  and  judge,  and  we  have  too  great 
an  interest  in  peopling  our  world  with  magnif- 
icent illusions  and  hopes.  But  let  the  least  ex- 
ternal indication  be  dear  and  precious  to  us." 

In  this  the  poet  says  all,  while,  on  another 
page,  the  man  of  science,  with  firm  integrity, 
minimizes  evidence  and  refuses  to  be  convinced. 
There  is  a  region  where  the  poet  knows  almost 
everything  worth  knowing.  There  is  a  region 
where  the  man  of  science  knows,  not  everything 
worth  knowing,  but  all  that  is  known.  There  is 
a  misty  mid-region  where  a  full-minded,  large- 
hearted  man  can  live  happily.  He  gets  the  mes- 
sage going  and  coming.    He  receives  what  the 

99 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

poet  has  to  say  and  what  the  man  of  fact  has  to 
say  and  he  constructs  his  world  from  the  frag- 
mentary contributions  of  both  regions.  Maeter- 
linck himself  in  "Our  Eternity,"  dwells  on  this 
central  ground.  Shakespeare  and  Isaiah  are  on 
his  right  hand.  On  his  left  hand  are  William 
James  and  other  psychological  students  of  the 
evidence  of  spooks. 

Poets  are  enamored  of  death.  Nine-tenths  of 
all  the  imaginative  literature  of  the  world  is 
concerned  with  love  and  death,  the  begetter 
and  the  extinguisher.  The  sweetest  lines  in 
Shakespeare  deal  with  love;  the  stateliest  lines, 
Hamlet's  and  Macbeth's,  are  upon  death.  The 
chief  interest  of  life  is  in  dying.  We  get  our 
highest  emotions  from  some  other  person's 
death,  and  we  adapt  our  entire  course,  from  the 
cradle  to  the  grave,  with  a  view  to  the  fact  that 
we  are  going  to  quit  in  some  year  determined  by 
fate  or  God  or  other  power  not  quite  under- 
stood, a  year  carefully  figured  out  by  the  actu- 
aries of  the  life  insurance  companies. 

Man  is  a  perfect  coward  in  the  face  of  death, 
his  own  or  that  of  somebody  he  loves.  The  be- 
liever and  the  unbeliever  alike  bewail  the  great 
adventure.  The  tears  shed  by  the  believer  in 
immortality  and  by  the  disbeliever  are  the  same 
hot,  saline,  human  drops.  Everybody  wants  an 
answer,  and  only  the  adherents  of  certain  sects 

lOO 


LIBRARY 

MAETERLINCK'S  ESSAYS         y^^^y'*^" 

receive  an  answer  that  satisfies  them.  Those 
answers  do  not  satisfy  me  or  you,  not  because 
there  is  anything  wrong  in  the  answers,  but  be- 
cause the  people  that  hold  the  answers  behave 
as  all  the  rest  of  us  do  in  the  presence  of  death. 
Maeterlinck,  on  the  basis  of  modern  evidence, 
argues  for  two-hundred  and  fifty-eight  pages 
that  we  do  not  know  what  happens  when  we  die. 
"In  any  case,  I  would  not  wish  my  worst  enemy, 
were  his  understanding  a  thousand-fold  loftier 
and  a  thousand-fold  mightier  than  mine,  to  be 
condemned  eternally  to  inhabit  a  world  of  which 
he  had  surprised  an  essential  secret  and  of 
which,  as  a  man,  he  had  begun  to  grasp  an  atom." 
Amen !  That  leaves  us  where  we  started.  But 
the  fact,  the  cold,  interesting,  magnificent  fact, 
is  that  we  are  afive,  and  some  of  us  are  working 
and  some  are  playing.  Maeterlinck  is  a  great 
child  playing  with  flowers  and  with  words.  He 
is  also  a  competent  workman,  and  he  is  assisted 
by  another  skilful  craftsman  to  whom  English 
readers  owe  much,  Mr.  Alexander  Teixeira  de 
Mattos,  who  translates  Maeterlinck  into  Eng- 
lish. He  is  a  fine  artist.  Following  faithfully 
the  run  of  our  English  idiom,  he  succeeds  in 
keeping  for  our  Anglo-Saxon  eyes  and  ears  the 
color,  tone,  or  whatever  it  is,  of  Maeterlinck's 
beautiful  style. 

lOI 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

To  the  newest  generation  of  adult  readers  the 
dawn  of  a  literary  light  is  a  rare  experience.  It 
is  as  if  the  courses  of  our  literature  were  Arctic 
in  their  slowness,  as  if  the  day  came  at  long  in- 
tervals, and  then  without  warmth  or  brilliance. 
Our  fathers  knew  the  joy  of  welcoming  the  lat- 
est novel  of  Dickens  or  a  new  volume  of  essays 
by  Carlyle.  The  only*  great  day  whose  begin- 
ning young  men  have  witnessed  is  the  day  of 
Kipling;  his  light  mounted  rapidly  to  a  high 
noon,  and  if  the  afternoon  shadows  have  begun 
to  deepen  prematurely,  that  sun  is  still  beauti- 
ful and  strong.  Other  lights  have  kindled  in 
the  last  fifteen  years,  and  have  gone  out  before 
they  had  fairly  dislodged  the  darkness,  or  have 
continued  to  burn  dimly. 

Eyes  accustomed  only  to  darkness  and  uncer- 
tain lights  are  in  condition  to  be  deluded  by  the 
phantoms  of  false  dawn;  it  is  therefore  unwise 
to  greet  with  too  much  enthusiasm  the  arrival 
of  Mr.  Joseph  Conrad.  Even  if  the  dawn  is 
real,  it  is  certainly  overcast  with  heavy  clouds, 
and  it  has  not  proved  bright  enough  to  startle 

*I  ask  the  reader  to  remember  that  this  was  written  in  1906. 

105 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

the  world.  Nevertheless,  his  light  is  of  unique 
beauty  in  contemporary  literature,  and  the  story 
of  its  kindling  makes  interesting  biography, 

Joseph  Conrad  Korzeniowski  was  born  fifty 
years  ago  in  Poland.  His  father,  a  critic  and 
poet,  and  his  mother,  who  was  exiled  to  Siberia, 
were  engaged  in  revolutionary  journalism.  At 
nineteen  Conrad  left  home,  to  escape  an  unset- 
tled life,  and  also,  it  is  fair  to  assume,  to  satisfy 
his  love  of  adventure.  He  found  work  on  Eng- 
lish vessels,  and  this  fact  gave  to  contemporary 
English  letters  a  man  who  might  otherwise  have 
written  in  French.  To-day  he  appears  in  hand- 
books of  biography  as  Master  in  the  British 
Merchant  Service,  and  Author.  At  nineteen  he 
had  not  mastered  English ;  at  thirty-eight  he  had 
published  no  book.  Since  then  he  has  published 
about  a  volume  a  year.  In  preparation  for  his 
books  he  sailed  as  able  seaman,  mate,  and  mas- 
ter, for  twenty  years,  on  steam  and  sailing  craft, 
and  meanwhile  he  was  reading  deep  in  French 
and  English  literature,— all,  we  are  told,  with 
no  intent  to  become  a  writer.  Indeed  it  was  a 
period  of  ill  health  resulting  in  an  enforced 
idleness  from  the  familiar  sea  that  gave  him  op- 
portunity to  put  some  of  his  adventures  into 
words.  Perhaps  he  is  a  lesser  illustration  of  a 
theory  of  Thoreau's  that  a  word  well  said  ''must 
have  taken  the  place  of  a  deed  by  some  urgent 

iq6 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

necessity,  even  by  some  misfortune,  so  that  the 
truest  writer  will  be  some  captive  knight,  after 
all."  However  that  may  be,  the  intellectual  and 
physical  adventures  of  Conrad's  life  were  abun- 
dant, and  they  reappear,  discernible  though 
transfigured,  in  the  substance  and  the  qualities 
of  his  work. 

His  ten  books  are  for  the  most  part  concerned 
with  the  waters  of  the  earth,  and  the  men  that 
sail  on  the  face  of  the  waters,  and  with  lands, 
far  from  English  readers,  to  be  reached  only 
by  long  journeying  in  ships.*  His  first  book, 
"Almayer's  Folly,"  tells  the  story  of  a  disap- 
pointed Dutch  trader  in  Borneo,  whose  half- 
caste  daughter  runs  away  with  a  Malay  chief. 
His  second  book,  "An  Outcast  of  the  Islands," 
deals  further  with  the  career  of  Almayer  and 
with  that  of  another  exiled  Dutchman.  "Nostro- 
mo,"  has  for  its  scene  an  imaginary  South  Amer- 

*Almayer's   Folly.     The   Macmillan   Co.     1895. 

An  Outcast  of  the  Islands.    Tauchnitz.    1896^. 

The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus   (Children  of  the  Sea).    Dodd, 
Mead  &  Co.     1897. 

Tales  of  Unrest.     Charles  Scribner's  Sons.     1898. 

Lord  Jim.    McClure,  Phillips  &  Co.     1899. 
•     The  Inheritors    (with  F.   M.  Huefifer).     McClure,   Phillips  & 

Co.     1901. 

Typhoon.    G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons.     1902. 

Falk.     McClure,  Phillips  &  Co.     1903. 

Youth.     McClure,  Phillips  &  Co.     1903. 

Romance  (with  F.  M.  Hueffer).  McClure,  Phillips  &  Co. 
1904. 

Nostromo.     Harper  &  Brothers.     1904. 

107 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ican  state,  and  its  heroes  are  an  Englishman  and 
an  Italian.  "The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus"  (pub- 
lished in  America  as  "The  Children  of  the 
Sea")  and  "Typhoon"  are  each  the  chronicle  of 
a  voyage.  "Lord  Jim"  is  the  story  of  a  young 
mate  who  disgraces  himself  by  one  unseaman- 
like  act,  and  becomes  a  wanderer  in  the  eastern 
islands,  and  finally  a  kind  of  king  in  a  village 
of  savages.  "Tales  of  Unrest"  contains  five  stor- 
ies, two  of  which  are  about  Malays,  and  another 
about  white  traders  in  an  African  station.  The 
hero  of  "Falk" — the  title  story  of  a  volume  of 
three  pieces — is  a  Scandinavian  sailor  who  has 
been  a  cannibal,  and  who  wins  the  daughter  of 
a  German  ship  captain  in  an  Eastern  port. 
"Youth,"  the  first  story  in  a  volume  of  three,  is 
the  memory  of  a  young  mate's  voyage  in  an  un- 
seaworthy  ship,  which  burns  and  leaves  the 
crew  to  seek  an  Eastern  seaport  in  the  boats. 
The  second  story,  "The  Heart  of  Darkness,"  is 
an  account  of  a  journey  into  the  Belgian  Congo 
State  and  a  curious  study  of  the  effect  of  soli- 
tude and  the  jungle  and  savagery  on  a  white 
trader.  The  third  piece  in  the  volume  is  the 
story  of  a  ship-captain  who  steers  his  ship  with 
the  help  of  a  Malay  servant  and  lets  no  one 
guess  until  the  end  that  he  is  blind.  Of  two 
books  written  in  collaboration  with  Mr.  Ford 
M.   Hueffer,  thef  only  one  worth  considering, 

io8 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

^'Romance,"  comes  the  nearest  to  being  the  kind 
of  fiction  that  the  advertisements  announce  as 
"full  of  heart  interest,  love,  and  the  glamor  of 
a  charming  hero  and  heroine."  It  begins  with 
a  smuggler's  escapade  in  England,  and  ends  in 
an  elopement  in  the  West  Indies;  the  best  parts, 
probably  Mr.  Conrad's  share  in  the  work,  are 
those  about  the  sea  and  all  that  on  it  is,  fogs, 
ships,  and  bearded  pirates.  In  these  books  are 
men  and  women  of  all  civilized  nations,  the  ac- 
quaintance of  a  globe-trotter,  and  there  are,  be- 
sides, enough  Malays,  Chinamen,  and  Negroes 
to  make  the  choruses  of  several  comic  operas. 
But  in  Conrad  they  are  serious  people,  every 
Malay  with  a  soul  and  a  tragedy;  even  the  Nig- 
ger of  the  Narcissus  is  equipped  with  psycho- 
logical machinery. 

Conrad's  subject-matter,  the  secretion  of  ex- 
perience, is  rich  enough  and  of  sufficiently 
strange  and  romantic  quality  to  endow  a  writer 
of  popular  fiction;  and  his  style, — that  is,  the 
use  of  words  for  their  melody,  power,  and 
charm, — is  fit  for  a  king  of  literature.  Steven- 
son, who  found  so  little  sheer  good  writing 
among  his  contemporaries,  would  have  wel- 
comed Conrad  and  have  lamented  that  he  could 
not  or  would  not  tell  his  stories  in  more  brief, 
steady,  and  continuous  fashion. 

For  there  is  the  rub.    Conrad  is  not  instinc- 
109 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

tively  a  story-teller.  Many  a  writer  of  less  gen- 
ius surpasses  him  in  method.  He  has  no  gift 
of  what  Lamb  calls  a  bare  narrative. 

There  are  writers  with  magnificent  power  of 
language  who  do  not  attain  that  combination  of 
literary  and  human  qualities  which  is  readable- 
ness,  and  there  are  others  who  interest  many 
people  in  many  generations,  and  yet  do  not 
write  well.  To  most  readers  Dickens  is  as  de- 
lightful when  he  writes  slovenly  sentences  as 
when  he  writes  at  his  best.  Scott,  the  demigod, 
pours  out  his  great  romances  in  an  inexpressive 
fluid.  On  the  other  hand,  Walter  Pater  writes 
infallibly  well.  These  illustrations  are  intended 
to  suggest  a  difference  which  is  a  fact  in  liter- 
ature, and  are  not  to  be  carried  to  any  conclus- 
ive comparison.  The  difference  exists  and  it  is 
not  a  strange  fact.  It  is  strange,  however,  that 
Conrad,  who  spins  yarns  about  the  sea,  master 
of  a  kind  of  subject-matter  that  would  make  his 
books  as  popular  as  ''Robinson  Crusoe"  and 
"Treasure  Island,"  should  be  one  of  those  who 
can  write  but  cannot  make  an  inevitably  attrac- 
tive and  winning  book  for  the  multitude. 

Either  he  knows  his  fault  and  can  not  help  it, 
or  he  wills  it  and  does  not  consider  it  a  fault. 
There  is  evidence  on  this  question.  Several  of 
his  stories  are  put  in  the  mouth  of  Marlow,  an 
eloquent,  reflective,  world-worn  man.    In  one 

no 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

place  Conrad  says,  "We  knew  that  we  were 
fated,  before  the  ebb  began  to  run,  to  hear 
about  one  of  Marlow's  inconclusive  experi- 
ences." The  story  Marlow  tells  is  no  more  in- 
conclusive and  rambling  than  most  of  the  other 
stories,  so  that  one  is  forced  to  conclude  that 
Marlow's  character  as  narrator  is  Conrad's  con- 
cession to  his  own  self-observed  habit  of  mind. 
In  another  place  Conrad  says:  "The  yarns  of 
seamen  have  a  direct  simplicity,  the  whole 
meaning  of  which  lies  within  the  shell  of  a 
cracked  nut.  But  Marlov/  was  not  typical  (if 
his  propensity  to  spin  yarns  be  excepted),  and 
to  him  the  meaning  of  an  episode  was  not  inside 
a  kernel,  but  outside,  enveloping  the  tale  which 
brought  it  out  as  a  glow  brings  out  a  haze,  in 
the  likeness  of  one  of  these  misty  halos  that 
sometimes  are  made  visible  by  the  spectral  il- 
lumination of  moonshine."  Evidently  Conrad 
prefers  or  pretends  to  prefer  the  haze  to  the 
kernel. 

In  an  essay  on  Henry  James  he  openly  scorns 
the  methods  usual  to  fiction  of  "solution  by  re- 
wards and  punishments,  by  crowned  love,  by 
fortune,  by  a  broken  leg  or  sudden  death,"  and 
says:  "Why  the  reading  public,  which  as  a  body 
has  never  laid  upon  the  story-teller  the  com- 
mand to  be  an  artist,  should  demand  from  him 
this  sham  of  divine  omnipotence  is  utterly  in- 

III 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

comprehensible."  Thus  Mr.  Conrad  flings 
down  the  gauntlet  to  those  demands  of  readers 
which  greater  men  than  he  and  Mr.  James  have 
been  happy  to  satisfy  without  sacrifice  of  wis- 
dom and  reality. 

A  further  announcement  of  his  literary  creed 
he  made  in  a  kind  of  artistic  confession  publish- 
ed a  few  years  ago.  "His  (the  prose  writer's) 
answer  to  those  who  in  the  fulness  of  a  wisdom 
which  looks  for  immediate  profit,  demand 
specifically  to  be  edified,  consoled,  amused,  who 
demand  to  be  promptly  improved  or  encour- 
aged, or  frightened,  or  shocked,  or  charmed, 
must  run  thus:  'My  task  which  I  am  trying  to 
achieve  is  by  the  power  of  the  written  word  to 
make  you  hear,  to  make  you  feel — it  is  before 
all  to  make  you  see.  ...  If  I  succeed,  you  shall 
find  there,  according  to  yout  deserts,  encour- 
agement, consolation,  fear,  charm — all  you  de- 
mand; perhaps  also  that  glimpse  of  truth*  for 
which  you  have  forgotten  to  ask." 

A  writer  with  ideals  so  high  and  strongly  felt 
commits  himself  for  trial  by  exacting  standards. 
It  is  necessary  to  remind  Mr.  Conrad  that  if  a 
reader  is  to  feel,  he  must  first  understand;  if  he 
is  to  hear,  he  must  hear  distinctly;  and  if  he  is  to 
see,  his  eye  must  be  drawn  by  interest  in  the  ob- 

*These  Slavs  (see  above  on  Tolstoy)  are  all  for  Truth,  but 
they  are  not  Chadbandians.  They  are  artists.  And  so  was  the 
Anglo-Saxon   who  made  Chadband. 

112 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

ject,  and  it  can  look  only  in  one  direction  at 
once.  **Nostromo"  is  told  forward  and  backward 
in  the  first  half  of  the  book,  and  the  prelimin- 
ary history  of  the  silver  mine  is  out  of  all  pro- 
portion to  the  story  of  Nostromo,  the  alleged 
hero  of  the  book.  "Lord  Jim"  is  confused.* 
The  first  few  chapters  are  narrated  in  the  third 
person  by  the  author.  Then  for  three  hundred 
pages  Marlow,  a  more  or  less  intimate  specta- 
tor of  Jim's  career,  tells  the  story  as  an  after- 
dinner  yarn.  It  would  have  taken  three  even- 
ings for  Marlow  to  get  through  the  talk,  and 
that  talk  in  print  involves  quotation  within  quo- 
tation beyond  the  legitimate  uses  of  punctuation 
marks.  In  other  stories  the  point  of  view  fails. 
In  "The  Nigger  of  the  Narcissus"  are  confer- 
ences between  two  people  in  private  which  no 
third  person  could  overhear,  yet  the  narrative 
seems  to  be  told  in  the  first  person  by  one  of  the 
crew.  In  "Typhoon,"  where  a  steamer  with  deck 
almost  vertical  is  plunging  through  a  storm,  we 
are  on  the  bridge  beside  the  simple  dogged  cap- 
tain while  he  shouts  orders  down  to  the  engine- 
room  through  the  tube.  Without  warning  we 
are  down  in  the  engine-room,  hearing  the  cap- 
tain's voice  from  above,  and  as  suddenly  we  are 
back  on  the  bridge  again.  A  man  crawls  across 
the  deck  in  a  tempest  so  black  that  he  cannot  see 

*No,  it  is  not.     It  is  clear  as  daylight. 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

whose  legs  he  is  groping  at.  We  are  immediate- 
ly informed  that  he  is  a  man  of  fifty,  with  coarse 
hair,  of  immense  strength,  with  great  lumpy 
hands,  a  hoarse  voice,  easy-going  and  good-na- 
tured,— as  if  the  man  were  visible  at  all,  except 
as  a  blot  in  the  darkness! 

Conrad  has  a  mania  for  description.  When 
anything  is  mentioned  in  the  course  of  narrative, 
though  it  be  a  thousand  miles  from  the  present 
scene,  it  must  be  described.  Each  description 
creates  a  new  scene,  and  when  descriptions  of 
different  and  separated  places  appear  on  the 
same  page,  the  illusion  of  events  happening  be- 
fore the  eye  is  destroyed.  If  a  writer  is  to  trans- 
port us  instantaneously  from  one  quarter  of  the 
globe  to  another  he  should  at  least  apprise  us 
that  we  are  on  the  magic  rug,  and  even  then  the 
space-o'erleaping  imagination  resents  being 
bundled  off  on  hurried  and  inconsequential 
journeys.  Often  when  Conrad's  descriptions  are 
logically  in  course,  they  are  too  long;  the  cur- 
rent of  narrative  vanishes  under  a  mountain  (a 
mountain  of  gold,  perhaps,  but  difficult  to  the 
feet  of  him  who  would  follow  the  stream)  ;  and 
when  the  subterranean  river  emerges  again,  it 
is  frequently  obstructed  by  inopportune,  though 
subtle,  exposition. 

Conrad's  propensity  for  exposition  is  allied, 
no  doubt,  with  his  admiration  for  Mr.  Henry 

114 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

James,  of  whom  he  has  written  an  extremely 
"literary"  appreciation.  Too  much  interest  in 
masters  like  Flaubert  and  Mr.  James  is  not  gen- 
tlemanly in  a  sailor,  and  it  cannot  help  a  sailor 
turned  writer,  who  pilots  a  ship  through  a  mag- 
nificent struggle  with  a  typhoon,  leads  us  into 
the  bewitching  terror  of  the  African  jungle, 
and  guides  us  to  Malay  lands  where  the  days 
are  full  of  savage  love,  intrigue,  suicide,  mur- 
der, piracy,  and  all  forms  of  picturesque  and 
terrific  death.  Mr.  Conrad  finds  that  there  are 
"adventures  in  which  only  choice  souls  are  in- 
volved, and  Mr.  James  records  them  with  a 
fearless  and  insistent  fidelity  to  the  peripeties 
of  the  contest  and  the  feelings  of  the  combat- 
ants." That  is  true  and  fine,  no  doubt,  but  the 
price  which  Mr.  Conrad  pays  for  his  ability  to 
discover  it  is  the  fact  that  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  readers  of  good  masculine  romance  are 
not  reading  "Lord  Jim,"  or  finding  new  "Youth" 
in  a  young  mate's  wondrous  vision  of  the  East, 
or  welcoming  a  new  hero  in  Captain  Whalley. 
A  man  who  can  conceive  the  mournful  tale  of 
Karain  and  the  fight  between  the  half  crazy 
white  men  at  an  African  trading  post  has  a  kind 
of  adventure  better,  as  adventure,  than  the  ex- 
periences of  Mr.  James's  choice  souls.  Steven- 
son knew  all  about  Mr.  James  and  his  "peripet- 
ies," but  he  could  stow  that  knowledge  on  one 

115 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

side  of  his  head,  and  from  the  other  side  spin 
'Treasure  Island"  and  "The  Wrecker".  "The 
Sacred  Fount"  never  could  have  befuddled 
the  chronicle  of  the  amiable  John  Silver,  but  in 
Mr.  Conrad's  "An  Outcast  of  the  Islands," 
where  it  seems  to  be  a  question  whicn  white 
man  will  kill  the  other,  after  a  dramatic  meet- 
in  the  presence  of  a  Malay  heroine,  each  man 
stands  still  before  our  eyes  and  radiates  states  of 
mind. 

The  lover  who  finds  fault  with  his  sweetheart 
because  he  is  so  proud  of  her  is  perfectly  human 
and  also  perfectly  logical.  So  my  reason  for 
dwelling  on  Mr.  Conrad's  shortcomings  is  be- 
cause his  books  are  thoroughly  worth  consider- 
ation. His  advent  is  really  important.  More 
than  any  other  new  writer  he  is  master  of  the 
ancient  eloquence  of  English  style;  no  one  since 
Stevenson  has  surpassed  in  fiction  the  cadence 
and  distinction  of  his  prose.  Never  has  an  Eng- 
lish sailor  wTitten  so  beautifully,  never  has  ar- 
tist had  such  full  and  authoritative  knowledge 
of  the  sea,  not  even  Pierre  Loti.  Stevenson  and 
Kipling  are  but  observant  landsmen  after  all. 
Marryat  and  Clark  Russell  never  write  well, 
though  they  tell  absorbing  tales.  There  was 
promise  in  Jack  London,  but  he  was  not  a 
seaman  at  heart.  Herman  Melville's  eccentric 
genius,  greater  than  any  of  these,  never  led  him 

ii6 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

to  construct  a  work  of  art,  for  all  his  amazing 
power  of  thought  and  language.  Conrad  stands 
alone  with  his  two  gifts  of  sea  experience  and 
cultivation  of  style.  He  has  lived  on  the  sea, 
loved  it,  fought  it,  believed  in  it,  been  baffled  by 
it,  body  and  mind.  To  know  its  ways,  to  be  mas- 
ter of  the  science  of  its  winds  and  waves  and  the 
ships  that  brave  it,  to  have  seen  men  and  events 
and  the  lands  and  waters  of  the  earth  with  the 
eye  of  a  sailor,  the  heart  of  a  poet,  the  mind  of  a 
psychologist — artist  and  ship-captain  in  one — 
here  is  a  combination  through  which  Fate  has 
conspired  to  produce  a  new  writer  about  the 
most  wonderful  of  all  things,  the  sea  and  the 
mysterious  lands  beyond  it. 

If  we  grant  that  he  is  not  master  of  the  larger 
units  of  style,  that  is,  of  construction,  we  can 
assert  that  in  the  lesser  units,  sentence  for  sen- 
tence, he  is  a  master  of  the  English  tongue. 
There  is  a  story  that  he  learned  English  first 
from  the  Bible,  and  his  vigorous  primal  usages 
of  words,  his  racial  idioms  and  ancient  rich 
metaphors  warrant  the  idea  that  he  came  to  us 
along  the  old  highway  of  English  speech  and 
thought,  the  King  James  version.  His  sentences, 
however,  are  not  biblical  as  Stevenson's  and 
Kipling's  often  are,  but  show  a  modern  sophis- 
tication and  intellectual  deliberateness.  He  fre- 
quently reminds  us  that  he  is  a  Slav  who  learn- 

117 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ed  French  along  with  his  native  tongue,  that 
he  has  read  Flaubert  and  Maupassant  and 
Henry  James.  Approaching  our  language  as  an 
adult  foreigner,  he  goes  deep  to  the  derivative 
meanings  of  words,  their  powerful  first  intent- 
ions, which  familiarity  has  disguised  from  most 
of  us  native-born  to  English.  He  has  achieved 
that  ring  and  fluency  which  he  has  declared 
should  be  the  artist's  aim.  Conrad's  prose  lifts 
to  passages  of  great  poetic  beauty,  in  which  the 
color  of  the  sea,  its  emotional  aspects,  its  deso- 
lation and  its  blitheness,  are  mingled  with  its 
meaning  for  the  men  who  sail  it,  its  "austere 
servitude,"  its  friendliness  and  its  treachery. 

"The  ship,  a  fragment  detached  from  the 
earth,  went  on  lonely  and  swift  like  a  small 
planet.  Round  her  the  abysses  of  sky  and  sea 
met  in  an  unattainable  frontier.  A  great  circu- 
lar solitude  moved  with  her,  ever  changing  and 
ever  the  same,  always  monotonous  and  always 
imposing.  Now  and;  then  another  wandering 
white  speck,  burdened  with  life,  appeared  far 
ofif, — disappeared,  intent  on  its  own  destiny. 
.  ,  .  The  august  loneliness  of  her  path  lent 
dignity  to  the  sordid  inspiration  of  her  pilgrim- 
age. She  drove  foaming  to  the  southward,  as  if 
guided  by  the  courage  of  a  high  endeavor.  The 
smiling  greatness  of  the  sea  dwarfed  the  extent 
of  time." 

ii8 


JOSEPH  CONRAD 

No  fairer  temptation  can  be  offered  to  a  read- 
er who  does  not  know  Conrad  than  to  quote  a 
passage  from  the  end  of  "Youth,"  and  no  more 
honest  praise  can  be  offered  to  Conrad  than 
to  say  that  it  is  a  selected,  but  by  no  means  uni- 
que, specimen  of  his  genius. 

A  crew  that  have  left  a  burning  ship  in  boats 
find  an  Eastern  port  at  night.  The  weary  men 
tie  to  the  jetty  and  go  to  sleep.  This  is  the  young 
mate's  narrative  years  after,  the  narrative  of  the 
reflective  and  eloquent  Marlow:  "I  was  lying 
in  a  flood  of  light,  and  the  sky  had  never  looked 
so  far,  so  high,  before.  I  opened  my  eyes  and 
lay  without  moving.  And  then  I  saw  the  men 
of  the  East — they  were  looking  at  me.  The 
whole  length  of  the  jetty  was  full  of  people.  I 
saw  brown,  bronze,  yellow  faces,  the  black  eyes, 
the  glitter,  the  color  of  an  Eastern  crowd.  And 
all  these  beings  stared  without  a  murmur,  with- 
out a  sigh,  without  a  movement.  They  stared 
down  at  the  boats,  at  the  sleeping  men  who  at 
night  had  come  to  them  from  the  sea.  Nothing 
moved.  The  fronds  of  palms  stood  still  against 
the  sky.  Not  a  branch  stirred  along  the  shore, 
and  the  brown  roofs  of  hidden  houses  peeped 
through  the  green  foliage,  through  the  big 
leaves  that  hung  shining  and  still  like  leaves 
forged  of  heavy  metal.  This  was  the  East  of  the 
navigators,  so  old,    so    mysterious,  resplendent 

119 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

and  somber,  living  and  unchanged,  full  of 
danger  and  promise.  ...  I  have  known  its  fas- 
cinations since:  I  have  seen  the  mysterious 
shores,  the  still  water,  the  lands  of  brown  na- 
tions, where  a  stealthy  Nemesis  lies  in  wait, 
pursues,  overtakes  so  many  of  the  conquering 
race,  who  are  proud  of  their  wisdom,  of  their 
knowledge,  of  their  strength.  But  for  me  all  the 
East  is  contained  in  that  vision  of  my  youth.  It 
is  all  in  that  moment  when  I  opened  my  young 
eyes  on  it.  I  came  upon  it  from  a  tussle  with  the 
sea — and  I  was  young — and  I  saw  it  looking  at 
me.  And  this  is  all  that  it  left  of  it!  Only  a 
moment  of  strength,  of  romance,  of  glamour,  of 
youth!" 


120 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY. 

Nothing  that  Joseph  Conrad  writes  is  negli- 
gible; he  is  one  of  few  living  writers  whom  we 
must  have  complete  to  the  last,  or  the  latest,  pub- 
lished word.  Readers  who  care  only  for  the 
yarn-spinner  will  not  find  much  in  his  volume 
of  essays,  ''Notes  on  Life  and  Letters,"  but  even 
they  will  find  something.  And  for  those  to 
whom  Conrad  is  more  than  a  story  teller,  an  in- 
comparable magician,  these  small  bits  from  his 
laboratory  will  have  much  of  the  charm  of  the 
larger  pieces,  if  only  the  reminiscent  charm  that 
brings  any  book  of  his,  the  least  read  or  read 
longest  ago,  swiftly  to  the  surface  of  memory. 
If  a  mere  landlubber  may  hazard  the  simili- 
tude, the  captain  will  always  show  his  qualities 
whether  he  is  on  the  bridge  of  a  liner  or  in  a 
rowboat. 

The  essays  on  books  are  unpretentious  notes 
— eight  pages  on  Henry  James,  seven  on  Mau- 
passant, twelve  on  Anatole  France,  short  excur- 
sions in  criticism  made  between  the  longer  voy- 
ages to  the  islands  of  the  blessed.  Like  most 
criticism  written  by  men  of  genius,  these  papers 
are  interesting  for  what  they  say  about  another 

123 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

man  of  genius  and  also  for  what  they  say  about 
the  critic.  One  of  the  most  satisfactory  essays 
in  what  it  reveals  of  Conrad  is  least  satisfactory 
as  objective  criticism — the  one  about  Marryat 
and  Cooper,  in  which  there  is  a  declaration  of 
descent  in  terms  of  surrender.  To  be  sure,  since 
the  elder  men  are  seamen  and  writers  of  the  sea, 
Conrad's  delight  in  them  is  understandable  and 
not  to  be  denied.  But  there  are  some  things  that 
must  be  denied  even  by  a  critic  who  gets  seasick 
a  mile  off  shore.  One  is  Conrad's  reiter- 
ated judgment  that  the  greatness  of  Marryat  "is 
undeniable."  If  Marryat  is  great,  then  so  is 
Oliver  Optic.  And  when  Conrad  speaks  of  the 
''sureness  and  felicity  of  effect"  of  the  prose  of 
Cooper — Cooper,  whose  style  grates  on  the  ear 
and  who  drags  us  by  the  sheer  power  of  his 
story  through  his  verbal  infelicities — then  I 
jump  overboard  and  leave  these  literary  sailors 
to  fight  it  out. 

When  we  get  back  on  land  to  another  of 
Conrad's  masters,  Guy  de  Maupassant,  I  feel 
less  shaky.  In  "Tales  of  Unrest"  are  two 
stories,  "The  Return"  and  "The  Idiots,"  in 
which  I  long  ago  thought  I  discovered  the  right 
kind  of  influence  from  the  French  master— 
what  Conrad  praises  as  Maupassant's  austere 
fidelity  to  fact.  Yet  one  is  puzzled  by  the  im- 
plied praise  in  the  very  dubious  statement  that 

124 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY 

"this  creative  artist  [Maupassant]  has  the  true 
imagination;   he    never    condescends  to  invent 
anything."    Just  what  does  that  means?    If  "A 
Piece  of  String"  and  "The  Necklace"  are  not 
diabolically    ingenious    inventions,     then     the 
word  invention  means  nothing    as    applied    to 
fiction.  In  point  of  invention  how  far  apart  are 
the  story  of  the  girls  in  "La    Maison   Tellier" 
and  the  story  of  the  girl  in  the  pathetic  troupe 
in  "Victory"?    Both  stories  are  equally  invent- 
ed, equally  true  to  nature,    equally   free    from 
"the    miserable  vanity  of  a  catching    phrase." 
But  what  is  a  catching  phrase?    I  suppose  that  a 
Frenchman  gets  somewhat  the  same  shiver  of 
delight    from    fine    rhythms    in    Maupassant's 
prose  that  we  get  from  fine  rhythms  in  Conrad. 
Both  men — I  could    quote    many    examples — 
strike  out  amazing  metaphors,    the    poetry  of 
prose,  which  are  not  decorations  hung  on  the 
uutside  but  are  the  unremovable  intestines  of 
uieir  story.  Such  metaphors  in  rhythm  are  sure- 
ly "catching  phrases,"  but  they  are  not  miser- 
able   vanities.      I    wonder    if    Conrad    has    a 
moment  now  and  then  when    he    distrusts  his 
own     eloquence — an     eloquence     which     has 
brought  against  him  from  more  than  one  critic 
the  charge  of  being  a  phrase  maker. 

Conrad's  prose  is  not  so  hard  and  compact  as 
Maupassant's,  and  except  the  two  short  stories 

125 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

I  have  mentioned  I  recall  nothing  in  Conrad 
which  in  manner  or  substance  obviously  illus- 
trates his  own  statement  that  he  has  been  "in- 
spired by  a  long  and  intimate  acquaintance  with 
the  work"  of  Maupassant.  His  greatest  short 
stories,  "Youth"  and  "The  Heart  of  Darkness," 
seem  worlds  away  from  the  French  master.  But 
inspiration,  the  influence  of  one  artist  on  an- 
other, does  not  mean  imitation  in  method  or  any 
visible  resemblance  in  effect.  It  may  mean  a 
fundamental  similarity  in  artistic  attitude.  The 
elements  of  similarity  between  the  French  writ- 
er and  the  British  are  the  plain  virtues,  honesty 
and  courage,  which  Conrad  rightly  ascribes  to 
Maupassant;  for  these  are  the  central  virtues  ia 
the  creed  which  Conrad  announced  many  years 
ago  and  to  which  he  has  loyally  adhered  in  the 
remotest  strange  seas  of  romance. 

Another  of  Conrad's  masters,  acknowledged 
in  the  phrase  "twenty  years  of  attentive  acquain- 
tance" (and  the  phrase  was  written  in  1905) 
is  Henry  James.  This  seems  a  curious  disciple- 
ship  if  we  consider  only  the  material:  James 
static,  land-bound,  class-bound;  Conrad  adven- 
turous, errant,  familiar  with  all  breeds  and  de- 
grees of  men.  But  much  the  same  thing  happens 
to  both  kinds  of  material.  For  in  the  first  place 
the  material  is  not  essentially  different;  it  is  the 
history  of  a  two-legged  animal  staggering  on 

126 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY 

land  or  aboard  ship.  And  in  the  second  place 
what  happens  is  simply  (though  it  is  not  so 
simple)  that  an  artist  tries  to  put  this  animal 
steady  on  its  feet  and  make  it  give  a  reasonable 
account  of  itself — through  himself.  It  gets 
transmitted  through  an  intelligence,  a  personal- 
ity, a  style,  into  something  more  interesting  than 
the  actual  poor  creature  who  wabbles  along  the 
street  or  on  the  deck  of  a  steamer.  The  courage- 
ous interpreters  make  their  fellow  men  stand 
up,  and  the  real  hero  of  a  romance  is  the  ro- 
mancer. 

This  is  one  of  the  paradoxes  of  fiction  which 
the  mere  reader  of  fiction  and  of  criticism  writ- 
ten by  masters  of  fiction  can  enjoy,  that  the  mod- 
ern self-conscious  story  tellers,  forever  pro- 
claiming their  devotion  to  an  objective  reality, 
to  the  naked  fact,  and  even,  like  Conrad,  pre- 
tending scorn  of  the  phrase,  are  wilful  persons 
who  distort  life  into  a  new  reality.  There  is 
something  almost  naive  in  the  honest  belief  of 
Tolstoy,  James,  Conrad,  that  nature,  human 
nature,  is  something  outside  the  artist,  lying 
over  there,  and  that  the  artist  standing  over 
here  observes  it,  renders  it,  "mirrors"  it.  James 
himself,  a  most  sophisticated  realist,  was  not  al- 
ways so  insistent  as  Conrad  seems  to  think 
on  the  function  of  the  novelist  as  historian; 
some  years   later   than   Conrad's   essay,   James 

127 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

found  fault  with  the  younger  novelists  because 
their  work  was  too  undigested,  because  it  was 
not  sufficiently  remade,  transformed  by  an  in- 
dividual interpreter — that  is,  though  he  did  not 
say  it  so  harshly,  the  younger  men  were  not  in- 
teresting individuals,  not  men  of  first-rate  im- 
agination. 

But  we  must  not  get  too  far  away  from  Con- 
rad and  his  particular  relation  to  James.  He 
has  a  generously  envious  admiration  for  James's 
inconclusiveness,  for  the  novel  that  stops  but 
does  not  end  because  life  does  not  end;  it  seems 
to  be,  like  his  admiration  for  Maupassant's  ac- 
curacy and  directness,  a  declaration  of  some- 
thing that  he  has  striven  for  and  not  always  ac- 
complished. Conrad  winds  his  own  stories  up 
pretty  sharply,  wipes  out  his  people  with  anni- 
hilation more  desolating  than  the  conventional 
piling  of  corpses  at  the  end  of  "Romeo  and 
Juliet"  or  "Hamlet.'"  Recall  the  obliterating 
finality  of  "Lord  Jim,"  of  "Victory,"  which 
ends  with  the  blank  word  "nothing."  Or,  where 
death  does  not  conclude  it  all  but  the  character 
fives  on,  remember  the  abrupt  inevitable  ter- 
mination of  "The  Rescue":  "Steer  north!"  An- 
other relation  which  I  have  suggested  and 
which  Conrad  as  critic  does  not  hint  is  this: 
Conrad's  material,  though  superficiallyi  it  is 
made  up  of  adventure,  wreck,    blood,    piracy, 

128 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY 

mystery,  and  Stevensonian  yo-heave-ho,  is,  as  he 
treats  it,  often  as  static  as  anything  in  James;  it 
is  stationary,  concerned  with  the  moods  of  men, 
analytic,  psychological  (that  tiresome  word  has' 
to  do  for  it),  even  while  the  storm  rages;  and 
this  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  readers  with  a 
taste  for  ripping  yarns  have  not  welcomed  him 
with  the  unanimous  popularity  which  they  ac- 
corded to  Stevenson  and  Kipling,  to  name  fine 
artists  and  not,  of  course,  to  mention  cheap 
favorites.  If  we  really  understood  Conrad's  fic- 
tion we  have  no  difficulty  in  understanding  his 
filial  relation  to  Henry  James.  Begin  with  the 
paragraph  on  page  13  of  "Notes  on  Life  and 
Letters:"  "Action  in  its  essence,  the  creative  art 
of  the  writer  of  fiction,"  etc.,  and  see  if  the  rest 
tnat  follows  is  not,  with  a  change  or  two,  as  good 
an  account  of  Joseph  Conrad  as  of  Henry  James 
— better,  indeed,  since  one  master  of  fiction  wri- 
ting of  another  speaks  with  two  voices  or  with 
a  voice  proceeding  from  a  two-fold  authority 
and  wisdom. 

Joseph  Conrad,  novelist,  child  of  English  and 
Continental  literature,  is  not  more  unaccount- 
able than  any  other  literary  genius.  But  how  to 
explain,  or  even  remember  at  all,  that  the  head 
of  living  English  men  of  letters,  next  to  Hardy, 
is  a  Pole  named  Korzeniowski?  It  is  fair  to  re- 
member that  and  be  inquisitive  about  it  because 

129 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

in  "Notes  on  Life  and  Letters"  he  pretends  to 
write  autobiography,  and  reminds  us  of  his  ori- 
gin in  a  paper  called  "Poland  Revisited."  It  is 
a  baffling  narrative,  even  more  baffling  than  the 
vague  book  which  he  chose  to  call  "A  Personal 
Record."  Conrad  in  quest  of  his  youth  never 
gets  back  to  Poland  at  all  except  as  a  British 
tourist.  The  paper  consists  of  thirty-two  pages. 
Mr.  Joseph  Conrad  Korzeniowski  reaches  Cra- 
cow on  the  twenty-fourth  page.  There  are  two 
or  three  pages  of  reminiscence,  chiefly  about  his 
father's  death.  Then  war  is  declared  (this  is  in 
1914),  and  the  British  subject,  with  the  assis- 
tance of  the  American  Ambassador,  escapes 
from  Poland  and  amid  the  booming  of  distant 
guns  in  Flanders  sails  safely  back  through  the 
Downs  "thick  with  the  memories  of  my  sea- 
life." 

Mr.  Conrad  is  the  least  patriotic  of  Poles  and 
the  most  patriotic  of  Englishmen.  His  political 
opinions,  which  he  was  evidently  invited  to  ex- 
press by  some  English  editor  who  remembered 
the  fading  fact  of  Korzeniowski  and  appreci- 
ated the  luminous  fact  of  Joseph  Conrad,  the 
writer,  are  no  better  and  no  worse  than  any  com- 
petent journalist  might  have  delivered.  His 
hatred  of  Russia,  expressed  long  before  his 
adopted  country  became  the  ally  of  the  Czar, 
may  have  its  origin  in  some  boyhood  bitterness. 

130 


A  CONRAD  MISCELLANY 

But  it  is  an  Englishman  who  speaks,  not  a  Pole. 
His  prophecy  of  the  downfall  of  Russian  autoc- 
racy and  of  the  menace  of  Prussianism  shoots  into 
the  future  with  as  true  an  aim  as  any  man  could 
have  had  in  1905^  and  a  prophet  is  to  be  excused 
for  having  said  at  that  time  that  there  was  in 
Russia  "no  ground  ready  for  a  revolution." 
"Conrad  political"  is  less  interesting  than  "Con- 
rad controversial,"  since  his  controversial  utter- 
ances were  provoked  by  the  sinking  of  the  Tit- 
anic, the  question  of  the  safety  of  ships,  and  the 
stupidity  of  marine  officials  on  land,  subjects 
which  he  can  discuss  with  the  cool  knowledge 
of  the  expert  and  the  vehemence  of  an  offended 
master  of  ships  and  words. 

But  the  true  men  of  the  four  into  which  in  his 
preface  he  divides  himself  are  "Conrad  liter- 
ary" and  "Conrad  reminiscent."  The  reminis- 
cence is  not  of  a  dimly,  even  indififerently,  re- 
membered Poland,  but  of  England  and  the  sea. 
On  the  twenty- four-page  journey  to  the  five- 
page  sojourn  in  Cracow  what  happens?  London, 
flashed  on  you  in  a  few  sentences  with  an  origin- 
al vividness  as  if  Englishmen  had  never  de- 
scribed it  before,  realized  in  brief  transit,  an 
immense  solid  thing,  compared  to  which  Cra- 
cow is  an  insubstantial  dream.  He  cannot  re- 
capture his  boyhood,  but  he  gives  you  instantly 
the  London  of  to-day  and  the  London  of  his 

131 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

youth  when  the  British-Polish  apprentice  was 
looking  for  a  berth.  And  then  the  voyage  across 
the  North  Sea.  Here  we  are  at  home.  '^The 
same  old  thing,"  he  says.  "A  grey-green  ex- 
panse of  smudgy  waters  grinning  angrily  at  one 
with  white  foam-ridges,  and  over  all  a  cheer- 
less, unglowing  canopy,  apparently  made  of  wet 
blotting  paper." 

"The  same  old  thing!"  The  sea  is  the  same  old 
thing,  water  deep  and  shoal,  storm  and  calm, 
fog  and  clear  weather,  light  and  darkness,  star- 
shine  and  sunshine.    It  is  understandable  that 
from  time  to  time  a  new  poet  should  be  born, 
Byron,  Tennyson,  Swinburne,  Whitman,   Con- 
rad, Masefield,  who,  being  a  different  man  from 
all  the  rest,  should  phrase  some  mood  of  the  sea 
in  words  that  no  other  poet  in  centuries  had 
used.    But  Conrad  has  written  fifteen  volumes 
mostly  about  the  sea,  many  pages  necessarily 
about  some  aspect  which  he  has  treated  more 
than  once.     His  treatment  is  so  unmistakably 
his  own  that  you  could  recognize  any  passage 
as  his  if  you  saw  it  on  a  piece  of  torn  paper 
blown  from  nowhere.    Yet  it  is  truer  of  him 
than  of  Shakespeare  that  he  never  repeats,  has 
no   cliches,  no   pet  phrases,  but  in   each  book 
finds  astonishing  new  images,  as  if  he  himself 
had  not  written  before.    How  does  he  do  it? 


132 


STRINDBERG 


STRINDBERG 

Some  men  of  genius  at  forty  or  fifty  arrive  at 
a  view  of  life,  an  attitude  toward  the  human 
comedy,  as  inclusive  and  definite  as  it  is  possi- 
ble for  them  to  conceive.  Hardy  at  seventy  is 
quite  recognizable  the  man  that  he  was  at  forty. 
The  Meredith  of  i860  is  the  Meredith  of  1890. 
They  grow,  they  improve  or  change  their  artis- 
tic methods.  But  their  natures  do  not  undergo 
violent  revolutions.  Other  men,  Tolstoy  for  ex- 
ample, experience  a  catastrophic  annihilation 
of  some  part  of  themselves  and  emerge  from 
the  confusion,  remade,  fired  with  new  beliefs. 
Tolstoy  had  one  great  battle  with  himself  which 
divided  his  life  into  two  main  periods,  and  after 
the  struggle  his  philosophy,  whatever  its  worth, 
was  fairly  settled,  and  he  knew  how  to  express 
it  clearly  over  and  over  again. 

Strindberg  seems  to  have  been  continuously 
at  war  with  Strindberg;  and  the  peace  that  he 
found  was  but  the  death-bed  repentance  of  a 
man  whose  forces  were  spent.  He  went  through 
many  phases.  "The  Growth  of  a  Soul",  which 
is  autobiographical,  might  better  be  called  "The 
Conflicts  of  a  Soul".    It  seethes  with  ideas,  ends 

^35 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

in  a  half-formed  philosophy,  and  is  only  a  sec- 
tion of  Strindberg's  intellectual  adventures.  He 
was  ten  men  at  ten  different  times,  and  he  was 
ten  men  all  the  time.  He  expressed  every  as- 
pect of  himself.  His  manifold  genius  was  mas- 
ter of  all  forms  of  literature.  As  Emerson  said 
of  Swedenborg,  in  whom  Strindberg  found  all 
the  light  that  his  dark  soul  ever  knew,  he  lies 
abroad  on  his  times,  leviathan-like.  Undoubted- 
ly to  know  him,  one  must  know  him  entire,  and 
I  do  not  pretend  to  complete  knowledge  of  his 
life  and  works. 

Some  fragments  of  his  total  artistic  expres- 
sion are  not  intelligible  when  they  are  read 
apart  from  his  other  books.  "The  Inferno"  is  a 
confused  and  murky  nightmare  which  takes  on 
form  and  purpose  only  when  the  light  of  bio- 
graphy is  turned  on  it.  Other  works  of  Strind- 
berg, read  by  themselves,  are  clear  and  shape- 

ly- 

"By  the  Open  Sea"  is  an  intensely  powerful 
study  of  an  overcultivated  man  and  a  primitive- 
ly passionate  woman.  It  is,  moreover,  the  work 
of  a  poet  who  loves  the  sea.  The  passage  in 
which  the  ichthyologist  observes  through  his 
telescope  the  wonder-world  beneath  the  surface 
of  the  water  is  rich  with  the  essential  poetry  of 
natural  fact.  The  translator,  Ellie  Schleussner, 
would  probably  say,  as  Strindberg's  admirers 

136 


STRINDBERG 

all  say,  that  his  resonant  poetic  prose  cannot  be 
rendered  in  another  language.  Yet  the  things 
that  he  sees  in  nature  and  his  interpretations  of 
them  are  in  their  naked  substance  the  imagin- 
ative stuff  which  is  poetry.  This  Titan  was  not 
content  to  be  poet,  novelist,  dramatist,  essayist, 
philosopher.  He  was  also  a  man  of  science,  no 
mean  rival,  they  say,  of  the  professional  student 
of  biology  and  chemistry.  The  eye  that  looks 
through  Borg's  telescope  has  been  trained  in  a 
laboratory  and  can  also  roll  with  a  fine  frenzy: 

"The  blenny,  which  has  developed  a  pair  of 
oars  in  front,  but  is  too  heavy  in  the  stern  and 
reminds  one  of  first  attempts  at  boat  building, 
raised  its  architectural  stone  head,  adorned  with 
the  moustachios  of  a  Croat,  above  the  heraldic 
foliage  among  which  it  had  lain,  and  lifted  it- 
self for  a  short  moment  out  of  the  mud  only  to 
sink  back  into  it  the  next  instant. 

"The  lump-fish  with  its  seven  backs  stuck  up 
its  keel;  the  whole  fish  was  nothing  but  an  enor- 
mous nose,  scenting  out  food  and  females;  it  il- 
luminated for  a  second  the  bluish-green  water 
with  its  rosy  belly,  surrounding  itself  with  a 
faint  aureole  in  the  deep  darkness;  but  before 
long  its  sucker  again  held  safely  to  a  stone,  there 
to  wait  the  lapse  of  the  million  years  which 
shall  bring  delivery  to  the  laggards  on  the  end- 
less road  of  evolution." 

137 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Strindberg  has  been  called  both  misogamist 
and  misogynist.  Yet  it  is  not  possible  to  collect 
and  compress  within  the  bounds  of  such  definite 
words  a  man  whose  ideas  on  any  one  subject  fly 
far  apart  as  the  poles.  If  he  sometimes,  often, 
expresses  virulent  detestation  of  women  and  all 
their  ways,  he  is  not  more  tender  toward  men. 
He  is  not  a  caresser  of  life.  He  hangs  the  whole 
human  race.  But  he  analyzes ;  tries  it  before  the 
twelve-minded  jury  in  himself  before  he  pro- 
nounces sentence.  Point  by  point,  detail  for 
detail,  he  is  just  in  perception  of  character  and 
motive.  His  final  view  is  simply  not  final,  but 
contradictory  as  life  itself.  He  thinks  that  woman 
is  a  snare  to  the  feet  of  a  man  who  would  walk 
upright  and  accomplish  something  in  the  world. 
Yet  he  believes  in  the  freedom  of  woman,  would 
give  her  the  vote,  and  emancipate  her  from 
economic  bondage  to  the  man.  He  even  cham- 
pions the  liberty  of  the  child,  condemns  "the 
family  as  a  social  institution  which  does  not  per- 
mit the  child  to  become  an  individual  at  the 
proper  time,"  and  draws  both  parents  as  victims 
of  "the  same  unfortunate  conditions  which  are 
honored  by  the  sacred  name  of  law." 

"Marriage"  contains  twenty  short  stories  of 
married  life,  so  many  variations  of  Strindberg's 
thesis  against  the  institution.  So  regarded,  the 
book  leaves  one  rather  sore  than  enlightened. 

«38 


STRINDBERG 

But  these  stories  are  stories,  not  tracts.  Strind- 
berg  is  a  great,  if  rough  and  savage,  artist.  His 
opinions,  whatever  they  are,  do  not  devitalize 
his  fiction.  His  short  narratives  are  as  skilful 
as  Maupassant's  in  at  least  one  respect,  com- 
pression, sinewy  economy.  He  can  put  in  ten 
pages  the  domestic  tragedy  of  a  lifetime.  He  is 
a  fine  or,  rather,  a  firm  craftsman,  and  though 
the  man  rages,  the  artist  has  the  artist's  restaint 
and  every  other  literary  virtue  short  of  ultimate 
beauty.  He  sets  down  terrible  things  with  a  cool 
succinctness.  One  story  ends  thus:  "The  chil- 
dren had  become  burdens  and  the  once  beloved 
wife  a  secret  enemy  despised  and  despising  him. 
And  the  cause  of  all  this  unhappiness?  The 
want  of  bread!  And  yet  the  large  storehouses 
of  the  new  world  were  breaking  down  under  the 
weight  of  an  over-abundant  supply  of  wheat. 
What  a  world  of  contradictions!  The  manner 
in  which  bread  was  distributed  must  be  at  fault. 
Science,  which  has  replaced  religion,  has  no 
answer  to  give;  it  merely  states  facts  and  allows 
the  children  to  die  of  hunger  and  the  parents  of 
thirst." 

"The  Red  Room"  is  a  satire  on  life  in  Stock- 
holm, on  life  everywhere.  The  pathetic  strug- 
gle of  the  artistic  and  literary  career,  its  follies 
and  pretenses,  the  fatuity  of  politics,    the   dis- 

139 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

honesty  of  journalism,  the  disillusion  that  awaits 
the  aspiring  actor,  all  these  things  run  riot 
through  the  lively  pages.  Strindberg's  satire  is 
severe,  it  is  sometimes  hard,  but  it  is  not  mean. 
He  has  a  large  if  rather  distant  sympathy  for  the 
poor  fellows  whose  aspirations,  failures,  dissipa- 
tions, and  friendships  he  portrays.  Of  two  young 
critics  he  says:  ''And  they  wrote  of  human  merit 
and  human  unworthiness  and  broke  hearts  as  if 
they  were  breaking  egg-shells."  He  writes  of 
their  unconscious  inhumanity  and  blindness  in  a 
way  that  reveals  his  own  clearness  of  vision  and 
fundamental  humanity.  The  laughter  of  a  som- 
ber humorist  has  in  it  a  tenderness  unknown  to 
merry  natures. 

The  dramatic  and  literary  critic  may  profit- 
ably read  the  chapter  called  "Checkmate,"  in 
which  the  young  journalist  is  made  to  say:  "The 
public  does  not  want  to  have  an  opinion,  it  wants 
to  satisfy  its  passions.  If  I  praise  your  enemy 
you  writhe  like  a  worm  and  tell  me  that  I  have 
no  judgment;  if  I  praise  your  friend,  you  tell 
me  that  I  have.  Take  that  last  piece  of  the 
Dramatic  Theatre,  Fatty,  which  has  just  been 
published  in  book  form.  .  .  .  It's  quite 
safe  to  say  that  there  isn't  enough  action  in  it: 
that's  a  phrase  the  public  knows  well;  laugh  a 
little  at  the  'beautiful  language';  that's  good,  old 

140 


STRINDBERG 

disparaging  praise;  then  attack  the  manage- 
ment for  having  accepted  such  a  play  and  point 
out  that  the  moral  teaching  is  doubtful — a  very 
safe  thing  to  say  about  most  things." 

Strindberg's  imagination  visualized  '  and 
dramatized  everything.  He  made  plays  of  an 
astonishing  variety  of  ideas  ranging  from  wild 
poetic  fantasy  to  grim  realism — a  range  as  great 
as  Ibsen's  and  greater  than  Hauptmann's. 

Glance  at  those  in  the  third  volume  of  Mr. 
Bjorkman's  translations,  not  to  analyze  them 
but  merely  to  note  their  diversity.  ''Swanwhite" 
is  a  fairy  fantasy  of  love,  confessedly  inspired 
by  Maeterlinck,  yet  in  no  sense  an  imitation  of 
him.  "Advent"  is  a  Christmas  miracle  play, 
which  embodies  a  gentle  sermon  on  the  forgive- 
ness of  sins — a  strange  sermon  from  the  man 
who  wrote  the  last  chapter  of  "By  the  Open 
Sea!"  "Debit  and  Credit"  is  a  realistic  sketch 
portraying  the  man  who  succeeds  at  the  expense 
of  other  people.  "The  Thunderstorm"  plays 
upon  an  old  theme,  one  that  Strindberg  knew 
by  experience,  the  failure  of  marriage  between 
an  elderly  man  and  a  young  woman.  It  ends 
rather  serenely  for  Strindberg,  whose  last  years 
were  not  peaceful:  "It's  getting  dark,  but  then 
comes  reason  to  light  us  with  its  bull's-eyes,  so 
that  we  don't  go  astray.  .  .  .  Close  the 
windows  and  pull  down  the  shades  so  that  all 

141 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

memories  can  lie  down  and  sleep  in  peace  of  old 
age." 

In  "After  the  Fire"  the  vanity  and  dishonesty 
of  petty  people  are  ruthlessly  exposed.  The 
Stranger  who  finds  all  reputations  to  have  been 
based  on  sham  and  all  pride  founded  on  wind, 
is  said  to  be  Strindberg  himself.  "Vanity,  van- 
ity. .  .  .  You  tiny  earth;  you,  the  dens- 
est and  heaviest  of  all  planets — that's  what 
makes  everything  on  you  so  heavy — so  heavy  to 
breathe,  so  heavy  to  carry.  The  cross  is  your 
symbol,  but  it  might  just  as  well  have  been  a 
fool's  cap  or  a  strait-jacket — you  world  of  de- 
lusions and  deluded!" 


142 


TAGORE 


TAGORE. 

Sometimes  the  world,  or  a  section  of  it,  goes 
wildly  cheering  after  a  prophet;  and  a  stranger, 
watching  the  multitude,  wonders  wherein  lies 
the  greatness  of  the  great  man.  The  sceptic  may 
be  too  ignorant  to  understand  or  he  may  be  too 
clear-sighted  to  be  deceived.  Not  many  years 
ago  the  tom-tom  of  the  Nobel  Prize  beat  before 
the  tent  of  the  modest  and  inoffensive  Hindoo 
poet,  Rabindranath  Tagore.  English  critics  and 
poets  of  first-rate  authority  have  called  him 
wonderful.  For  all  I  know  he  may  be  wonder- 
ful, for  I  have  not  read  all  his  work  in  English 
and  I  am  not  well  acquainted  with  Bengali. 
But  I  submit  that  in  "The  Crescent  Moon"  and 
"The  Gardener,"  there  is  not  one  great  line,  not 
one  poem  that  is  arresting,  compelling,  memor- 
aole.  Moreover,  there  is  much  that  is  false  and 
weak. 

O  Great  Beyond,  O  the  keen  call  of  thy  flute  1 
O  Farthest  End,  O  the  keen  call  of  thy  flute  I 

Now  that  may  do  in  India,  but  in  our  part  of 
the  world  it  is  feeble  orchestration.  The  poets 
of  the  Bible  and  English  poets  since  the  days  of 
the  Elizabethan  translation  have  equipped  the 

H5 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

celestial  choirs  with  more  sounding  instruments. 
One  cannot  without  a  smile  consider  the  far  end 
of  the  cosmos  playing  a  flute  or  a  piccolo. 
Harken  to  how  a  supreme  poet  makes  music 
worthy  of  the  wide  spaces : 

But  thou  dost  set  in  statelier  pageantry, 
Lauded  with  tumults  of  the  firmament; 

Thy    visible    music-blasts    make    deaf    the    sky, 
Thy  cymbals  clang  to  fire  the  Occident, 

Thou   dost  thy  dying  so  triumphally ; 

I  see  the  crimson  blaring  of  thy  shawms. 

This  is  from  Francis  Thompson's  "Ode  to  the 
Setting  Sun."  You  see  the  difference.  Thomp- 
son's lines  are  poetry.   Tagore's  simply  are  not. 

Miss  May  Sinclair,  herself  a  distinguished 
artist,  says  that  Mr.  Tagore's  translation  of  his 
Bengali  poetry  into  English  "preserves,  not  only 
all  that  is  essential  and  eternal  in  his  poetry, 
but  much  of  the  strange  music."  That  may  be 
so,  but  how  does  Miss  Sinclair  know  that?  Does 
she  understand  Bengali?  Does  she  read  it  and 
speak  it  well  enough  to  be  sure  that  Mr.  Tagore 
has  translated  himself  adequately?  i  Is  not  she 
affording  an  instance  of  criticism  that  in  an  ex- 
cess of  enthusiasm  runs  beyond  its  own  knowl- 
edge? Some  of  Tagore's  lines  are  mildly  sweet, 
.md  there  are  some  pretty  fancies  in  the  Child- 
Poems.  The  poem  in  "The  Gardener,"  which 
begins : 

Why  do  you  whisper  so  faintly  in  my  earS;  O 
Death,  my  Death?  } 

146 


TAGORE 

would  be  faintly  impressive  if  Walt  Whitman 
had  never  lived. 

Not  only  are  Tagore's  lines  not  great  but 
some  of  his  lines  are  foolish: 

Under  the  banyan  tree  you  were  milking  the  cow  with  your 
hands,  tender  and  fresh  as  butter. 

Perhaps  Mr.  Tagore  did  not  know  that  in 
English  "butter  fingers"  greasily  signifies  man- 
ual ineptitude.  I  can  not  take  that  line  seriously, 
nor  understand  how  Tagore  has  become  one  of 
England's  acknowledged  poets.  He  distorts  na- 
ture with  pathetic  fallacies  which  have  not  ver- 
bal splendor  to  carry  them,  as  the  verbal  splen- 
dor of  Shakespeare,  Shelley,  and  Thompson 
often  carries  a  metaphor  that,  so  to  speak,  will 
not  hold  water. 

I  paced  alone  on  the  road  across  the  field  while  the  sunset 
was  hiding  its  last  gold  like  a  miser. 

The  sunset  is  not  in  the  least  like  a  miser;  and 
a  true  lover  and  observer  of  nature  would  not 
allow  himself  such  a  niggardly  fallacious  im- 
age. Are  not  our  friends,  the  poets  and  critics, 
victims  of  the  spell  which  odd  things  out  of  the 
East  put  on  our  occidental  minds,  the  spell  that 
makes  some  people  run  after  queer  preachers 
and  philosophers  who  talk  religion  through 
their  turbans? 

One  is  reminded  that  Mr.,  or  Sir  Owen  Sea- 
man has  in  his  delicious  book  of  parodies,  "The 

147 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Battle  of  the  Bays",  an  Edwin-Arnoldy  thing 
that  runs  like  this: 

The  bulbul  hummeth  like  a  book 

Upon  the  pooh-pooh  tree, 
And  now  and  then  he  takes  a  look 

At  you  and  me, 
At  me  and  you. 

Kuchi!  Kuchoo! 

It  is,  I  confess,  sheer  perversity  that  made 
that  stanza  come  into  my  head  while  I  was  read- 
ing Tagore.  Tagore  does  not  rhyme;  he  puts 
his  verses  into  simple  prose,  most  of  which  is 
pleasant  enough,  but  none  of  which  is  rich  in 
thought  or  magnificent  in  phrase. 

Tagore  is  a  faker  in  the  English  sense  of  the 
word.  I  do  not  know  what  he  is  in  Hindoo.  He 
gives  lectures  in  America  to  audiences  that  are, 
of  course,  mostly  women.  Then  when  he  has 
got  all  the  money  he  can  get  from  them  (for 
his  schools;  he  is  not  selfish)  he  tells  them  as  a 
Parthian  shot  that  they  are  idle.  If  they  were 
not,  the  poor  ignorant  dears,  he  would  not  have 
had  any  audiences  or  any  money.  It  is  caddish 
to  kick  the  cow  that  gives  the  milk.  I  should 
rejoice  if  he  took  millions  from  the  idle  ladies 
of  America  to  help  the  ladies  of  India  and  to 
free  India  from  the  British  murderer  and  thief. 
Spoiling  the  Egyptians  is  a  good  game.  But  it 
is  not  playing  the  game  like  a  man  and  a  phil- 
osopher to  bite  the  hand  that  feeds  you. 

148 


TAGORE 

And  it  is  not  manly  or  philosophic  to  kiss  the 
hand  that  strikes  you.  Tagore  with  a  feeble 
gesture  relinquishes  his  British  title  as  a  pro- 
test against  British  crime  in  India.  If  he  had 
been  a  real  philosopher  and  a  true  patriot  he 
would  not  have  accepted  the  title  in  the  first 
place.  The  lost  leader  who  sticks  a  riband  in 
his  coat  does  not  recover  leadership  by  throwing 
the  riband  away.  The  political  and  social  be- 
liefs of  poets,  even  of  Dante  and  Shelley  and 
Hugo,  are  of  less  importance  than  their  sense  of 
beauty.  But  there  is  a  connection,  not  quite  im- 
pertinent to  a  purely  literary  discussion,  be- 
tween the  quality  of  a  poet's  work  and  his  char- 
acter as  it  is  expressed  when  he  descends  from 
Parnassus  and  uses  the  prose  of  politicians.  It 
is  not  surprising  that  Tagore,  who  babbles  to 
American  chautauquas  and  allows  an  English 
king  to  tap  him  on  the  shoulder,  should  be  a 
weak  and  stammering  poet.  That  voice  from 
the  east  is  not  impressive.  If  it  is  the  best  that 
modern  India  can  do,  then  India  is  done  for  in- 
tellectually as  well  as  economically. 


149 


REMY  DE  GOURMONT 


REMY  DE  GOURMONT. 

In  "Decadence  and  Other  Essays  on  the  Cul- 
fiire  of  Ideas,"*  Mr.  William  Aspenwall  Brad- 
ley has  made  an  excellent  selection  from  the 
work  of  Remy  de  Gourmont;  one  only  regrets 
that  space  did  not  permit  him  to  give  us  more. 
He  has  a  gift  unfortunately  rare  among  trans- 
lators: he  knows  his  original  and  he  knows  how 
to  write  the  language  into  which  he  translates. 
He  even  corrects  his  master  in  one  place:  where 
de  Gourmont,  stumbling  in  a  language  which 
he  has  not  quite  mastered,  writes  that  the  Eng- 
lish words,  ''sweet,"  and  "sweat,"  are  mots  de 
prononciation  identique,  Mr.  Bradley  gently 
wipes  out  the  blunder  with  "words  which  resem- 
ble each  other."  Not  that  de  Gourmont,  v^ith  his 
enormous  knowledge,  made  many  such  mistakes! 
I  merely  note  the  care  and  delicacy  of  the  trans- 
lator. 

Without  pretending  too  much  to  the  wisdom 
which  should  have  ensued,  I  remember  like  a 
shock  of  light,  as  if  a  blind  man  had  suddenly 
gained  his  vision,  my  introduction,  a  few  years 

*Decadence  and  Other  Essays  on  the  Culture  of  Ideas.  Remy 
de  Gourmont.  Translated  by  William  Aspenwall  Bradley.  New 
York:  Harcourt  Brace  &  Co.     1921. 

153 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ago,  to  the  work  of  de  Gourmont  (for  which  my 
thanks  are  due  to  Mr.  Martin  Loeffler,  who  is 
a  distinguished  musician  and  only  potentially  a 
man  of  letters).  If  you  wish  to  have  your  dark- 
ness illuminated,  associate  with  the  wise.  If  you 
are  groping  in  a  foreign  literature,  the  first  man 
to  meet  is  the  critic.  The  little  I  know  about 
France  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centur- 
ies I  owe  to  having  c4ung  to  the  broad  and  often 
elusive  coat-tails  of  Sainte-Beuve.  As  a  guide 
to  the  nineteenth  century  and  much  else  beside 
— back  to  Rome  and  Greece — the  most  stimula- 
ting cicerone  is  Remy  de  Gourmont. 

When  he  was  born,  the  gods  went  crazy  and 
put  into  one  person  an  elf  and  a  sage,  Ariel  and 
Prospero,  Morgan  and  Merlin.  It  is  no  uncom- 
mon thing  when  you  are  reading  a  French  book, 
by  an  author  with  whose  work  you  are  not  fam- 
iliar, to  find  facing  the  title-page  a  list  of  books 
du  meme  auteur  and  to  discover  that  he  has  pub- 
lished something  in  all  the  main  divisions  of 
imaginative  literature,  plays,  poems,  romances, 
criticism.  It  takes  a  Frenchman  to  box  the  lit- 
erary compass.  He  assumes  that  the  business  of 
a  writer  is  to  write,  and  he  learns  and  practises 
all  the  forms,  with  varying  degrees  of  success, 
to  be  sure,  just  as  a  musician,  trying  all  forms, 
may  be  at  his  best  in  songs  or  quartettes  for 
strings  or  symphonies  or  operas. 

154 


REMY  DE  GOURMONT 

De  Gourmont  played  every  instrument  in  the 
band  and  played  it  well.  His  range  and  versat- 
ility are  remarkable  even  for  a  Frenchman.  He 
took  all  knowledge  for  his  province.  In  spread- 
ing his  interests  wide  he  never  became  thin; 
even  when  he  played  on  the  surface  of  an  idea 
he  somehow,  in  a  page  or  two,  showed  the 
depth  of  mind  and  matter  underneath.  He  was, 
as  his  American  publishers  say,  poet,  critic, 
dramatist,  scholar,  biologist,  philosopher,  nov- 
elist, philologist,  and  grammarian.  He  was  an 
experimenter  and  explorer.  When  he  died,  just 
under  sixty,  he  was  still  looking  round  with  his 
keen  roaming  eye,  and  he  was  looking  sadly, 
for  the  war,  according  to  his  brother  Jean,  who 
writes  not  sentimentally  but  like  a  de  Gour- 
mont, killed  him. 

Even  the  colossal,  universal  genius,  the 
Hugo,  the  Goethe,  can  not  be  supreme  in  every 
realm  of  thought,  in  every  type  of  literary  ex- 
pression. De  Gourmont's  poetry,  to  my  ignor- 
ant alien  ear,  is  not  among  the  best  in  that  pro- 
lific and  still  living  period  of  French  poetry 
which  he  as  critic  did  so  much  to  encourage. 
As  for  de  Gourmont's  fiction,  "Une  Nuit  au 
Luxembourg,"  which  he  Imight  havd  tossed 
with  a  wink  into  the  lap  of  Anatole  France, 
does  not  greatly  enrich  French  fiction,  which  is 
already  rich  in  similar  achievements.    "Coul- 

155 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

eurs"  consists  of  delightful  twittings  on  ideas, 
and  surely  is  not  greatly  important  in  a  nation 
where  one  man  of  letters  out  of  four  has  mas- 
tered the  art  of  the  conte. 

De  Gourmont  is  supremely  the  critic,  the 
man  who  digests,  interprets,  reorganizes  the 
thoughts  of  other  men  and  in  the  process  adds 
to  those  thoughts.  His  favorite  method  of  re- 
organization is  disorganization,  "dissociation" 
(and  by  the  way,  that  word  is  good  in  English, 
as  in  French,  and  better  than  Mr.  Bradley's 
''disassociation").  He  pulls  ideas  to  pieces  and 
skilfully  puts  them  together  again.  He  is  an 
analyst,  a  dissector.  But  the  flowers  of  the  gar- 
den are  not  all  plucked  to  shreds  and  scattered 
on  the  paths,  nor  are  they  all  taken  to  the  labor- 
atory and  subjected  to  the  microscope.  De 
Gourmont  is  interested  in  things  living  and  in 
propagating  life.  ^'Toutes  nos  fleurs  sont 
fraiches,  jeunes  et  pleines  d'amour."  He  sur- 
veys wildernesses  and  lays  out  gardens.  No  other 
man  was  ever  blessed  with  such  a  combination 
of  the  safe,  sane,  intellectually  comfortable  and 
the  restless,  daring,  venturesome. 

He  loves  paradoxes  because  life  is  full  of 
contradictions,  and  his  paradoxes  are  often 
elucidations  and  conciliations  of  conflicting 
ideas,  never  the  cheap  and  facile  paradoxes  of 
a  Chesterton.    Is  Mallarme  obscure?    There  is 

156 


REMY  DE  GOURMONT 

never  absolute,  literal  obscurity  in  an  honestly 
written  work.  Besides,  there  are  too  few  ob- 
scure writers  in  French.  This  from  a  French- 
man whose  own  writing  is  a  marvel  of  clarity 
even  when  he  is  handling  subtle  and  difficult 
ideas!  Moreover,  de  Gourmont's  essays  on 
language  and  style  are  studies  in  precision,  in 
definition. 

De  Gourmont  is  a  wise  man,  who,  like  Soc- 
rates and  William  James,  is  not  afraid  to  joke, 
and  some  of  his  perversities  are  uttered  with  his 
ironic  tongue  in  his  cheek.  Like  all  fine  humor- 
ists he  is  profoundly  serious,  and  the  delicate 
play  of  his  fingers  is  backed  by  terrific  muscu- 
lar scholarship.  His  method  is  to  appear  to 
be  casual,  to  make  the  review  of  a  book  "une 
occasion  de  parler  un  peu"  and  then  to  pack 
into  six  pages  the  reading  of  a  lifetime.  He 
manipulates  Brunetiere  into  the  corner  and  an- 
nihilates him  before  you  have  time  to  realize 
that  there  is  no  button  on  the  rapier. 

For  all  his  tolerant  smile  and  sceptical  shrug, 
de  Gourmont  is  fighting  valiantly  for  ideas.  He 
wants  ideas  liberated  but  not  loose,  and  in  the 
very  act  of  freeing  them  he  defines  and  fixes 
them.  He  divides  long-mated  notions  in  order 
to  reassemble  them  according  to  his  private 
logic.  For  he  is  the  most  wilful  and  individual 
of  critics.    The  journalistic  multiplicity  of  his 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

subjects  is  unified  by  a  great  personality.  The 
"dissociator"  of  ideas  is  a  constructive  thinker, 
one  of  the  greatest  of  critics  in  a  nation  of  crit- 
ics and  sufficient  in  himself  to  stand  as  smiling 
refutation  of  Croce's  dictum  that  "French  crit- 
icism is  notably  weak  whenever  the  fundamen- 
tals of  art  are  concerned."  If  there  is  a  funda- 
mental of  art  that  de  Gourmont  missed,  I  doubt 
whether  it  is  to  be  discovered  in  any  German  or 
Italian  book.  For  de  Gourmont's  reading  em- 
braced the  literature  of  Europe,  and  he  was  es- 
pecially alert  to  philosophic  criticism.  He  was 
forever  in  search  of  principles;  but  the  result 
of  his  quest  is  not  a  massive  disquisition.  The 
solidity  of  his  learning  and  the  systematic  co- 
herence of  his  ideas  are  concealed  from  the  un- 
wary reader  by  the  lightness  of  his  tone  and 
also  by  his  brevity,  the  gift,  which  belongs  to 
the  race  of  Montaigne  and  Voltaire,  of  saying 
everything  in  a  few  sentences.  His  essays  are 
light  as  a  feather  and  yet  they  carry  tons  of  in- 
formation. The  aeroplane  looks  like  a  bird  but 
it  is  a  heavy  and  elaborate  piece  of  machinery. 
De  Gourmont  lived  in  an  ivory  tower,  the 
tower  of  a  wizard  who  combined  the  know- 
ledge of  an  ancient  necromancer  with  that  of 
a  modern  chemist.  He  was  much  alone,  for  only 
in  solitude  can  a  man  read  as  much  as  de 
Gourmont  read  and  write  about  it!  in  serene 

IS8 


REMY  DE  GOURMONT 

meditation.  Nevertheless,  he  was  in  and  of  the 
world  of  writers;  he  was  an  active  and  friendly 
editor;  he  made  the*  Mercure  de  France;  he 
encouraged  the  youngest  and  bravest  of  his  day; 
many  of  his  notes  record  conversations  with  the 
finest  men  of  his  time.  He  spent  his  days  with 
la  jeunesse  and  his  nights  with  aged  wisdom. 
When  he  retired  to  his  ivory  tower  he  carried 
under  one  arm  a  volume  of  mediaeval  Latin,  to 
add  to  his  enormous  library,  already  neatly 
stowed  in  his  head,  and  under  the  other  arm  the 
manuscript  of  the  youngest  French  poet. 

In  one  of  his  essays  de  Gourmont  plays  char- 
mingly with  the  reviewer's  too  facile  use  of 
"great";  "great  writer,"  "very  great  writer." 
Despite  that  delightful  warning  I  dare  say  that 
de  Gourmont  is  a  tres  grand  ecrivain,  not  a 
great  poet  nor  a  great  novelist,  but  the  greatest 
critic  that  has  been  born,  even  in  France  where 
critics  are  wont  to  be  born. 


159 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN. 

"Controversy,"  says  the  editor  of  the  Swift- 
Vanessa  letters,*  "might  have  been  more  mod- 
erate in  tone  and  more  fruitful  of  result,  if  writ- 
ers had  always  remembered  that,  though 
grounds  of  conjecture  are  abundant,  the  data 
for  forming  a  judgment  are  manifestly  incom- 
plete." Leslie  Stephen,  a  shrewd  and  cautious 
biographer,  with  a  lawyer's  gift  for  handling 
evidence,  says  "This  is  one  of  those  cases  in 
which  we  feel  that  even  biographers  are  not 
omniscient;  and  I  must  leave  it  to  my  readers 
to  choose  their  own  theory,  only  suggesting  that 
readers,  too,  are  fallible." 

I  propose  an  explanation  of  Swift,  but  pro- 
pose it  only  as  a  conjecture,  an  hypothesis.  I 
shall  not  even  argue  it  up  to  the  point  of  positive 
belief;  certainly  I  shall  not  push  it  beyond  the 
line  where  belief  borders  knowledge.  Conjec- 
ture is  good  if  it  remains  clearly  in  the  realm  of 
conjecture,  an  honest  area  of  thought,  and  does 
not  try  to  sneak  over  into  the  land  of  things 
proved. 

*Vanessa  and  Her  Correspondence  with  Jonathan  Swift.  Let- 
ters edited  for  the  first  time  from  originals.  With  an  introduction 
by  A.  Martin  Freeman.    Boston :  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

163 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

All  of  Swift's  relations  with  women,  and 
much  else  in  his  life,  may  be  accounted  for  b^ 
the  supposition  that  early  he  discovered  or  sus- 
pected that  he  was  insane,  that  he  believed  his 
insanity  might  be  transmissible,  that  he  was  con- 
sequently afraid  to  have  children,  that  he  was 
honest  and  strong  enough  to  keep  himself  in 
check,  that  the  resulting  suppression  made  him 
irascible  and  bitter,  that  he  was  a  vigorous  and 
passionate  man,  that  his  quick  shifts  from  tender 
fooling  to  savage  satire,  his  friendly  and  brutal 
moods,  his  strutting  arrogance  that  amazed 
the  coffee  houses,  were  not  due  to  any  tom- 
foolery of  politics  or  thwarted  ambition  in  the 
petty  matter  of  advancement  in  the  church  but 
were  due  to  a  conflict,  honorably  won  by  Swift, 
in  the  place  where  a  man  lives.  The  "early"  in 
this  supposition  is  important.  Leslie  Stephen, 
quoting  the  familiar  dark  prophecy  of  Swift  at 
the  age  of  fifty:  "I  shall  be  like  that  tree;  I 
shall  die  at  the  top,"  justly  observes  that  "a 
man  haunted  perpetually  by  such  forebodings 
might  well  think  that  marriage  was  not  for 
him."  But  Stephen  is  dealing  with  Swift  in 
middle  age  and  offering  an  explanation  of  why, 
assuming  that  Swift  was  not  already  married  to 
Stella,  he  did  not  marry  Vanessa.  Let  us  place 
the  beginning  of  the  perpetual  foreboding  early 

164 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN 

in  Swift's  life  and  see  if  the  main  facts,  so  far  as 
we  know  them,  will  lie  upon  this  supposition. 

Swift's  attacks  of  vertigo  began  in  his  youth. 
He  attributed  his  illness  to  an  over-consump- 
tion of  fruit  when  he  was  twenty-one.     Swift 
knew  better  than  that.    Even  if  we  assume  that 
medical  science  in  the  eighteenth  century  was 
stupid  and  backward,  Swift  was  too  intelligent 
to  believe  that  an  early  period  of  indigestion 
accounted  for  the  sufifering  which  afflicted  him 
all  his  life.    He  knew,  or  suspected  and  feared, 
what  was  the  matter  with  him.    In  1699,  when 
he  was  thirty-two,  he  wrote  some  resolutions, 
headed  "when  I  come  to  be  old."  Among  them 
is  this :  "Not  to  be  fond  of  children  or  let  them 
come  near  me  hardly."  Stephen  quotes  a  friend- 
ly commentator  as  saying:  "We  do  not  fortify 
ourselves  with  resolutions  against  what  we  dis- 
like but  against  what  we  feel  in  our  weakness 
we  have  reason  to  believe  we  are  really  inclined 
to."  That  friendly  commentator  was  right  and 
understood  human  nature,  though  he  had  never 
lived   (Stephen  does  not  name  him)    to    hear 
about  libido,  suppression,    defence,    inversion, 
and  other  wise  words  now  current. 

Stephen  goes  wrong,  it  seems  to  me,  in  his 
following  friendly  commentation:  "Yet  it  is 
strange  that  a  man  should  regard  the  purest  and 
kindliest  of  feelings  as  a  weakness  to  which  he 

165 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

was  too  much  inclined."  I  have  not  space  to 
quote  the  rest,  which  is  on  page  31  of  Stephen 
in  the  English  Men  of  Letters.  Swift  was  not 
fighting  against  a  weakness,  he  was  fighting 
against  a  strength.  He  resolves  "not  to  marrjr 
a  young  woman."  In  a  letter  he  calls  a  woman's 
children  her  "litter,"  and  that  has  been  quoted 
by  some  critics  as  an  example  of  his  brutality. 
He  loves  Tom,  Dick,  and  Harry  but  he  hates 
mankind.  Is  it  not  clear?  He  can  not  have  what 
he  wants,  and  what  he  wants  is  what  normally 
results  in  children,  in  more  mankind.  His  res- 
olution, superficially  harsh  and  misanthropic, 
is  a  masked,  or  inverted,  expression  of  desire. 
Such  expression  is  not,  of  course,  peculiar  to 
literary  satirists,  but  it  should  be  remembered 
that  Swift  had  supremely  the  ironic  trick  of 
thought,  the  gift  of  saying  a  thing  by  saying 
exactly  the  opposite. 

The  resolution  should  be  read  in  the  light  of 
the  fact  that  Stella  was  eighteen  years  old,  a 
grown  and  comely  woman.  But  the  interpre- 
tation of  it  depends  much  more  closely  on  the  ter- 
mination of  Swift's  affair  with  Varina.  The  date, 
1699,  suggests  this.  He  had  proposed  to  Varina, 
Miss  Waring,  in  1696,  in  a  letter  which  is  pas- 
sionate enough,  and  had  been  rejected,  at  least 
provisionally,  on  the  score  of  her  ill  health  and 
his  poverty.   Four  years  later,  after  he  had  re- 

166 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN 

ceived  the  living  at  Laracor  and  seemed  to  be 
on  the  way  to  other  preferments,  she  wished  to 
hold  him  to  his  word,  and  he  jilted  her.  There 
are  three  explanations.  One  is  that  he  had  fal- 
len in  love  with  Stella  and  so  out  of  love  with 
the  other  woman.  The  second  explanation,  Les- 
lie Stephen's,  is  that  his  ambitions  had  not  been 
realized,  his  advancement  had  not  been  bril- 
liant, and  marriage  would  have  kept  his  nose  to 
the  grind-stone  in  an  obscure  living.  That  ex- 
planation is  not  good,  for,  though  Swift  always 
had  an  eye  to  the  main  chance  and  was  worried 
about  money,  power,  and  position,  it  is  only 
men  of  cool  blood  or  men  who  have  extra-mar- 
ital opportunities  to  gratify  their  desires  who 
are  ever  deterred  by  considerations  of  thrift  and 
economy  from  marrying  the  beloved  woman. 
Swift  was  not  cold  but  passionate.  And  it  'is 
inconceivable  that  he,  a  clergyman  in  a  small 
parish,  was  finding  his  pleasure  in  illicit  inter- 
course. 

The  third  explanation,  which  I  venture  to 
suggest,  is  that  between  his  proposal  to  Varina 
in  1696  and  his  insulting  rejection  of  her  in 
1700,  between  his  twenty-ninth  and  thirty-third 
years,  he  had  discovered  a  reason  why  he  must 
not  live  with  a  woman.  His  resolutions,  remem- 
ber, not  to  marry  a  young  woman  and  not  to  be 
fond  of  children  were  written  in   1699.    How 

167 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

could  Stephen  believe  that  those  resolutions, 
with  others  "pithy  and  sensible,"  were  "for  be- 
havior in  a  distant  future?"  Swift's  heading, 
"when  I  come  to  be  old,"  means  nothing;  he  is 
writing  from  the  misery  of  the  moment.  Why 
is  the  letter  in  which  Swift  puts  an  end  to  poor 
Varina  so  brutal  and  insulting  that,  in  Stephen's 
words,  no  one  with  a  grain  of  self-respect  could 
accept  the  conditions  of  marriage  which  he  lays 
down?  Because  he  could  not  tell  her  the  real 
reason,  a  reason  based  on  fear  rather  than  on 
physiological  certainty.  It  is  an  honestly  dis- 
honest letter.  It  is  a  perfect  example  of  that  per- 
plexing contradiction  which  appears  every- 
where in  his  life  and  writings,  that  he  was  brut- 
ally honest,  saw  through  the  postures  and  masks 
of  everybody  else,  and  yet  postured,  attitudin- 
ized, and  lied  himself.  He  carried  his  secret 
agony  with  fortitude  and  alternately  raged 
against  the  world  and  fooled  with  it.  In  rela- 
tion to  the  Varina  episode  Stephen  m.isses  the 
point,  though  what  he  says  is  true  enough: 
"Swift  could  be  the  most  persistent  and  ardent 
of  friends.  But  when  anyone  tried  to  enforce 
claims  no  longer  congenial  to  his  feelings,  the 
appeal  to  the  galling  obligation  stung  him  into 
ferocity,  and  brought  out  the  most  brutal  side 
of  his  imperious  nature."  Though  a  man  has 
but  one  heart,  yet  his  relations  with  his  friends 

i68 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN 

are  quite  different  from  his  passions  for  women. 
A  proud,  ferocious  and  imperious  nature  is  not 
the  whole  story  of  Swift.  It  does  not  give  us  the 
real  foundation  of  the  story  of  Varina,  of  Stella, 
of  Vanessa  and  the  man  they  loved. 

On  the  foundation  which  I  propose  the  story 
of  Stella  will  rest  securely,  intelligibly.  If 
Swift  was  married  secretly  to  Stella  in  1716 — 
the  evidence  is  not  conclusive — the  marriage 
was  only  a  legal  ceremony  performed  perhaps 
for  the  purpose  of  securing  her  in  case  her  for- 
tunes went  wrong  or  gossip  or  other  circum- 
stances made  necessary  the  protection  of  his 
name.  Almost  certainly  there  was  no  physical 
marriage,  no  union  legal  or  illegal.  Why?  He 
was  free  and  she  was  free.  She  was,  by  his  own 
account,  a  charming  person  who  would  have 
been  quite  presentable  to  his  friends  and  in  all 
ways  helpful  to  a  man  in  middle  age  who  is 
supposed  to  need  a  woman  to  take  care  of  him. 
The  answer  is  simply  that  Swift  feared  to  pro- 
pagate his  tainted  stock,  that  he  refrained  and 
suffered.  And  the  "Journal  to  Stella"  is  a  record 
of  suffering,  of  passion  disguised  and  writhing. 
A  busy  man,  with  other  things  to  write,  does  not 
write  that  much  to  a  woman  he  does  not  love, 
and  he  does  not  write  that  way  to  a  woman  he 
openly  and  avowedly  loves.  The  "little  lan- 
guage," the  silliness,  the  foolings,  the  avoidance 

169 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

of  direct  declaration  of  love,  the  semi-paternal 
injunctions,  the  gossip  about  big  people,  much  of 
it  whimsical  chatter  in  which  we  get  only  by 
implication  the  serious  view  of  Swift  and  his 
times  that  has  made  it  an  important  historical 
document,  the  two  or  three  hintful  promises  of 
felicity  which  commit  Swift  to  nothing,  the  pas- 
sages of  melancholy  and  half-humorous  old 
man's  grouch — all  this  is  a  veiled  love  letter.  It 
is  tingling  and  nervous  and  alert  and  full  of 
pain,  not  the  idle  recreation  of  a  tired  man  of 
affairs  entertaining  a  child,  but  the  heartbreak 
of  a  powerful  man  of  forty-five  expressed  by  in- 
directions to  a  woman  of  thirty.  Perhaps  she 
understood  his  spleen  and  his  complaints  of  ill- 
healjh.  We  may  be  on  the  way  to  understand- 
ing them  now.  Certainly  Stephen  is  off  the 
track  when  he  says  that  there  are  "grounds  for 
holding  that  Swift  was  constitutionally  indis- 
posed to  the  passion  of  love."  Unless  he  means 
by  that  that  Swift  knew  that  there  was  some- 
thing in  his  constitution  which  made  the  ulti- 
mate realization  of  love  impossible.  And 
Stephen  does  not  mean  that,  for  he  speaks  of  the 
absence  of  traces  of  passion  from  writings  "con- 
spicuous for  their  amazing  sincerity."  An  am- 
azing example  of  a  sincere  biographer  missing 
the  trace!  Swift's  insistence  on  his  "coldness" 
and  his  assertion  that  he  did  not  understand  love 

170 


SWIFT'S  RELATIONS  WITH  WOMEN 

are  precisely  an  affirmation  of  what  the  words 
deny. 

Now  enters  the  third  woman  of  record — 
there  may  have  been  more — in  Swift's  unhappy 
sexual  life,  Vanessa,  Esther  Vanhomrigh.  At 
the  same  time  that  he  is  writing  his  long  love 
letter,  the  ''Journal  to  Stella,"  he  is  seeing  Van- 
essa. Of  course.  It  is  all  explicable.  The  man 
can  not  have  the  woman  he  wants  and  is  tantal- 
ized by  another  woman  who  wants  him.  He 
plays  and  he  won't  play.  He  is  tormented  by 
the  same  restraint  that  keeps  him  out  of  Stella's 
bed.  He  is  handsome,  virile,  and  distinguished. 
The  woman  is  crazy  about  him.  He  is  unable 
to  keep  away  from  her,  but  he  is  fighting,  for 
reasons  known  to  him,  against  the  impulse  to 
possess  her.  He  plays  again,  as  with  Stella,  a 
game  which,  viewed  superficially,  is  fraudulent 
and  unfair.  He  is  teacher,  guide,  philosopher, 
and  Dutch  uncle.  But  she  is  not  a  docile,  gentle 
girl  like  Stella.  Mr.  Freeman,  who  handles  his 
documents  admirably  and  is  not  slanted  from 
the  truth  by  moralistic  concern  for  hero  or 
heroine,  is,  nevertheless,  naive  and  blind  to  the 
facts  which  he  has  so  carefully  considered.  He 
says:  "The  tragedy,  then,  was  inevitable  from 
the  day  when  Vanessa  attempted  to  arouse  in 
him  a  love  of  which  he  was  incapable.  It  might 
have  been  hastened,  or  its  form  might  have  been 

171 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

different,  if  he  had  sternly  broken  with  Vanessa 
as  soon  as  he  discovered  the  nature  of  her  de- 
sires." Swift  was  not  incapable,  in  that  sense, 
and  he  knew  the  nature  of  her  desires,  for  he 
was  not  a  fool.  What  he  knew  also  was  the  na- 
ture of  his  own  desires  and  their  possible  con- 
sequences. That  is,  I  conjecture,  the  heart  of 
the  story  of  Swift's  heart. 


172 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS. 

I. 

The  letters  of  a  philosopher  usually  have  the 
primary,  if  not  exclusive,  interest  of  elucidat- 
ing and  extending  in  an  informal  way  the 
ideas  expounded  in  his  professional  writings. 
It  is  for  this  interest  that  one  would  turn 
to  the  letters  of  a  thinker  who  was  nothing 
but  a  thinker,  such  as  Kant  (if,  indeed,  there  is 
a  collection  of  Kant's  letters),  and  to  the  corres- 
pondence of  such  a  philosopher  as  Nietzsche, 
who,  aside  from  his  technical  contributions  to 
human  wisdom,  presents  fascinating  problems 
in  human  character,  personality,  biography.  The 
letters  of  Williams  James*  have  two  distinct 
values.  They  appeared  at  the  same  moment  with 
his  "Collected  Essays  and  Reviews"**  and  the 
two  publications,  taken  together,  complete  the 
intellectual  record  of  the  man.  Though  master 
and  man  can  not  be  separated,  yet,  as  good  dis- 
ciples of  James's  pluralism,  we  may  be  permit- 
ted to  divide  an  individual  into  two  "aspects." 

♦The  Letters  of  William  James.  Edited  by  his  son  Henry 
James.   Two  Vols.    Boston:  The  Atlantic  Monthly  Press. 

♦♦Collected  Essays  and  Reviews.  William  James.  New  York; 
Longmans,  Green  and  Co. 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

First  let  us  enjoy  the  letters,  simply  as  the  let- 
ters of  a  man  who  was,  incidentally,  a  philoso- 
pher. 

And  what  letters !  The  letters  of  Lamb,  of  Ed- 
ward Fitzgerald,  are  not  more  delightful.  The 
easiest  and  pleasantest  way  to  prove  that  would 
be  to  fill  the  rest  of  this  essay  with  quotations, 
and  that  way  would  be  in  consonance  with  the 
whimsical  spirit  of  James,  who  wrote  to  his 
youngest  son :  "Your  Ma  thinks  you'll  grow  up 
into  a  filosofer  like  me  and  write  books.  It  is 
easy  enough,  all  but  the  writing.  You  just  get 
it  out  of  other  books  and  write  it  down."  To 
write  a  jolly  letter  to  a  child,  to  ridicule  your- 
self and  your  profession  and  a  the  same  time  to 
defend  an  idea  with  vigor  and  determination, 
to  poke  fun  at  colleagues  and  heartily  respect 
them,  to  be  dignified  in  mental  shirt  sleeves,  to 
wink  one  eye  and  keep  two  keen  eyes  on  the  page 
or  the  fact  that  has  to  be  studied,  to  fling  words 
with  apparent  carelessness  and  never  for  a  mom- 
ent to  lose  control  of  words  or  thought — all  this 
means  a  great  character  and  a  fine  literary  ar- 
tist. 

James  says  of  Duveneck,  the  painter:  "I  have 
seen  very  little  of  him.  The  professor  is  an  op- 
pressor of  the  artist,  I  fear."  It  may  be  that  the 
professor,  which  James  was  and  officially  had 
to  be,  oppressed  the  artist  in  him.     But    the 

176 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

artist  would  not  down.    If  all  the  philosophic 
work  of  James  were  wiped  out  by  an  act  of  God 
or  by  the  arguments  of  philosophers,  James,  the 
man  of  letters,  would  slill  survive.  I  believe  that 
part  of  the  success  of  James  as  philosopher 
was  due  to  his  ability  to  say  what  he  meant  not 
only  with  logical  clarity  but  with  charm,  with 
the  skill  of  the  literary  artist.   Technical  Phil- 
osophy may  immortalize  or  bury  his  work.  The 
man,  the  startling,  original  person  must  be  im- 
perishable. No  matter  what  subject  he  touches, 
his  way  of  saying  things  is  superb.   He  had  an 
artist's  interest  in  the  art  of  writing.   Of  a  vol- 
ume of  his  essays  he  says:  "I  am  sure  of  your 
sympathy  in  advance  for  much  of  their  contents. 
But  I  am  afraid  that  what  you  will  never  ap- 
preciate is  their  wonderful  English  style!  Shake- 
speare  is   a   little   street-boy   in   comparison!" 
The  wise  man  has  his  tongue  in  his  cheek,  of 
course,  but  there  is  a  serious  idea  behind  the 
fooling.  Of  a  correspondent's  "strictures  on  my 
English"  he  writes :  "I  have  a  tendency  towards 
too  great  coUoquiality,"    What  sort  of  laborious 
philosopher  was  it  who  worried   James    about 
his  style,  his  fluent,  accurate,  imaginative  vehicle 
of  thought?     It  may  be  that  some  of  James's 
philosophic  ideas  are  quite  wrong.   But  there  is 
a  presumption  in  favor  of  the  truth  of  an  idea 
which  is  well  expressed. 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

James  argues  somewhere  that  a  style  as  thick  as 
Hegel's  can  not  be  the  "authentic  mother- tongue 
of  reason."  If  that  is  unfair  to  Hegel,  it  is  a  fair 
revelation  of  the  mind  of  James.  He  was  an 
advocate  and  an  exemplar  of  lucidity  of  expres- 
sion, and  was  always  putting  to  himself  and 
other  philosophers  the  plain  question:  "Just 
what  do  you  mean?"  But  his  sharpness  of  mind, 
though  often  aggressive,  was  never  offensive. 
He  seems  at  times  to  have  dulled  the  edge  of  his 
wit  in  order  not  to  hurt  the  other  fellow.  The 
editor  of  the  letters  has,  perhaps  wisely,  "not 
included  letters  that  are  wholly  technical  or 
polemic."  Probably  the  ideas  expressed  in  the 
technical  letters  are  repeated  in  James's  books. 
But  I  should  like  to  see  the  polemic  letters.  The 
editor  himself  in  the  act  of  withholding  them 
has  defined  their  merits:  "He  rejoiced  openly 
in  the  controversies  which  he  provoked  and  en- 
gaged in  polemics  with  the  good  humor  and  vig- 
or that  were  the  essence  of  his  genius."  The 
touches  of  polemic  writing  which  appear  in  the 
correspondence  that  is  given  us  reveal  this  good 
humor  and  vigoi^  and  make  ,one  hungry  for 
more.  He  was  staunch  and  dexterous  in  argu- 
ment and  never  yielded  an  inch,  but  he  could 
stop  and  laugh  at  his  opponent  and  at  himself. 
He  objected  to  Huxley's  somewhat  solemn  de- 
votion to  "Truth,"  yet  he  had  a  kind  of  skill  in 

178 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

argument  that  was  not  unlike  Huxley's.  He 
could  give  a  man  a  smashing  blow  in  the  ribs, 
and  even  show  a  quite  human  irritation,  but  his 
exquisite  courtesy  never  failed.  His  letters  to 
Godkin,  of  the  Nation,  protesting  against  un- 
fair criticism  of  the  work  of  the  elder  Henry 
James,  are  a  lesson  for  critics,  and  no  doubt 
Godkin's  reply  was  a  model  of  magnanimous 
contrition. 

James  had  an  immense  variety  of  interests  out- 
side philosophy,  though  perhaps  it  is  unphilo- 
sophical  to  imply  that  anything  can  lie  outside 
the  range  of  a  true  philosopher's  vision.  His 
letters  are  written  to  many  different  kinds  of 
persons;  the  best  of  them,  naturally,  arc  to  phil- 
osophers and  men  of  letters,  who  evoked  from 
him  an  amazing  multiplicity  of  ideas  and  to 
whom  he  let  fly  a  delicious  compound  of  sound 
reason  and  jocularity.  In  characterizing  other 
men  he  characteiized  himself.  For  example, 
what  he  says  about  Royce  embraces  both  men 
perfectly:  "that  unique  mixture  of  erudition, 
originality,  profundity  and  vastness,  and  human 
wit  and  leisureliness."  He  was  fortunate  in  his 
human  and  intellectual  contacts.  An  early  and 
abidingly  fortunate  contact  was  that  with  his 
father,  who  was  also  a  "filosofer."  His  last  let- 
ter to  his  father  is  beautiful.  It  brings  tears,  of 
which  the  most  stoical  philosopher  need  not  be 

179 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ashamed;  indeed,  one  might  rather  be  ashamed 
if  the  tears  did  not  come.  No  one  outside  the 
family  and  a  few  friends  has  a  right  to  read  that 
letter,  but  print  has  extended  the  privilege.  If 
Mr.  E.  V.  Lucas  or  any  other  anthologist  makes 
a  new  collection  of  examples  of  "the  gentlest 
art,"  the  letter  from  James  to  his  father  should 
be  included.  In  it  two  men  are  portrayed,  father 
and  son,  both  magnificently;  if  either  man  had 
been  less  than  great  the  letter  could  not  have 
been  written. 

James  was  born  a  philosopher;  philosophy  was 
In  the  blood  and  in  the  very  air  of  the  house- 
hold. There  is  no  better  instance  of  the  heredity 
of  genius  and  of  predestination  to  a  career.  Yet 
James  did  not  find  himself  immediately;  he 
floundered  about  in  the  world  of  thought  long 
after  the  age  at  which  most  men  have  hung  out 
shingles.  He  was  thirty  when  he  was  appointed 
instructor  in  physiology  at  Harvard,  and  his 
tardiness  in  establishing  himself  as  a  bread-win- 
ning citizen  fretted  him.  Lesser  men  who  feel 
that  the  expression  of  their  talents  has  been 
thwarted  or  postponed  may  take  comfort  from 
the  fact  that  James's  first  printed  book,  the 
"Psychology,"  appeared  in  1890,  when  he  was 
forty-eight  years  old. 

The  fact  that  James  was  an  intellectual  roam- 
er  and  did  not  proceed  docilely  from  a  doctor's 

180 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

degree  to  a  position  as  teacher,  in  a  groove  for- 
ever, accounts,  in  part,  for  the  flexibility  and 
variety  of  his  thought.  His  "dribbling,"  as  he 
calls  it,  during  years  when  he  suffered  from 
physical  illness  and  a  depressing  sense  of  impo- 
tence, was  not  altogether  bad  for  the  man  or  for 
the  philosopher.  He  wandered  about  Europe, 
became  bilingual,  if  not  trilingual  (he  was  never 
quite  happy  in  German  speech  or  German  phil- 
osophy). His  learning  was  enriched  with  odds 
and  ends  of  information  such  as  belong  rather 
to  the  man  of  the  world  than  to  the  professor. 
If  he  had  lived  all  his  life  in  Konigsberg  or 
Cambridge  he  would  have  been  neither  Kant 
nor  James.  To  him  philosophy  was  never  an 
affair  of  remote  abstract  heavens  or  of  little 
dusty  class  rooms.  He  served  academic  inter- 
ests faithfully  and  did  more  than  any  other  man 
to  make  the  department  of  philosophy  at  Har- 
vard the  finest  thing  in  American  university 
life.  But  he  was  in  constant  rebellion  against 
the  academic  world  and,  indeed,  against  all  in- 
stitutionalism.  He  wrote  to  Thomas  Davidson : 
"Why  is  it  that  everything  in  this  world  is  of- 
fered to  us  on  no  medium  terms  between  either 
having  too  much  of  it  or  too  little?  You  pine 
for  a  professorship,  I  pine  for  your  leisure  to 
write  and  study."  Yet  he  had  more  leisure  and 
freedom  than  most  men.  He  went  abroad  when- 

i8i 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ever  he  wanted  to  go,  and  never  knew  what  it 
was  to  be  down  to  his  last  dollar. 

His  lateness  in  finding  himself  professionally 
and  philosophically  is,  perhaps,  related  to  his 
perpetual  youth,  his  eagerness  for  new  ideas,  his 
inability  to  be  fixed  and  settled.  He  sometimes 
grasped  at  ideas  too  hastily  and  welcomed  such 
new  arrivals  as  Wells  and  Chesterton  with  a 
heartiness  which,  perhaps,  they  did  not  quite  de- 
serve. But  that  was  the  fault  of  his  enthusiastic 
catholicity.  He  hated  shut  minds  and  shut  doors 
of  thought  and  feared  nothing  except  that  some 
possibly  valuable  inquiry  might  be  hindered  or 
stopped  by  stupidity  and  prejudice.  His  col- 
league, Professor  Palmer,  called  him  "the  finest 
critical  mind  of  our  time."  Let  the  philoso- 
phers decide  whether  that  is  excessive  praise. 
We  mere  laymen  can  know  him  and  enjoy  him 
as  he  reveals  himself  in  his  letters,  a  vivacious, 
humorous,  affectionate  man. 

IL 

The  supreme  service  of  William  James  to 
philosophy  is  the  restoration  of  philosophy  to 
the  uses  of  life.  At  least  that  is  the  tendency  of 
his  philosophy.  Even  though  much  wisdom  still 
remains  shut  up  in  a  tower,  indifferent  to  life, 
and  though  life  may  often  be  ungrateful  to  and 
suspicious  of  such  wisdom  as  is  offered   to   it, 

182 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

nevertheless  James's  attempt  to  bring  about  a 
rapprochement  was  his  finest  contribution  and 
is  expressed  in  some  of  his  most  glowing  pages. 
He  came  at  the  right  time  and  illustrated  in 
himself  one  of  his  hearty  beliefs  that  Humanity 
will  produce  all   the  types  of  thinker  that  it 
needs.  At  the  moment  when  he  entered  the  realm 
of  philosophy,  the  physical  sciences  had  arro- 
gantly assumed,  if  not  all  wisdom,  the  possession 
of  the  correct  method  of  searching  for  wisdom. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  transcendental  philoso- 
phers held  themselves  aloof  from  the  physical 
sciences  and  ignored  psychology.   This  division 
of  interest  in  a  world  which  James  himself  tried 
to  keep  manageably  split  up  and  pluralistic,  was 
his  first  philosophic  perplexity  and,  in  his  treat- 
ment of  the  problem,  he  committed  himself  to 
inconsistencies    and    self-contradictions,  which 
were  partly  inherent  in  the  situation  and  partly 
due  to  his  temperament. 

Through  all  his  writings,  from  one  of  his 
earliest  papers  (that  on  Renan's  "Dialogues," 
republished  in  "Collected  Essays  and  Re- 
views") to  the  last  chapters  of  "The  Meaning 
of  Truth,"  James  saw  philosophers  as  so  many 
individuals,  each  fighting  under  his  own  banner 
of  truth,  and  he  was  puzzled  because  they  would 
not  be  reconciled  and  fight  together  against  the 
powers  of  darkness  which  must  be  conquered  if 

'83 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

philosophy  is  ever  to  be  worth  anything,  and  if 
there  is  ever  to  be  any  reason  why  there  should 
be  philosophers  to  sit  in  comfortably  endowed 
chairs.  No  critic  took  more  keenly  humorous 
delight  than  James  did  in  the  disputes  of  the 
schools,  or  stirred  up  with  more  lively  argu- 
ment the  factions  whose  lack  of  solidarity  he  de- 
plored. 

Take  two  examples.  While  James  was 
young  and  still  under  the  influence  of  his  labor- 
atory studies  he  made  out  a  good  case  for  psy- 
chology as  a  natural  science,  admitting  that  in 
its  present  stage  of  development  it  is  rather  a 
loose  subject,  but  demanding  for  its  best  inter- 
ests an  application  of  the  scientific  method. 
Then  he  saw  that  he  had  gone  counter  to  his 
own  belief  in  the  unity  of  knowledge,  or  the 
unity  of  study.  It  occurred  to  him  that  some- 
thing valuable  might  be  lost  to  psychology  if 
metaphysical  and  epistemological  inquiries  were 
debarred.  So  in  an  address  to  the  American 
Psychological  Association,  he  openly  renounced 
his  first  position,  adding,  however,  as  a  half- 
smiling  reservation,  that  metaphysics  should 
give  up  some  of  its  nonsense  as  a  condition  of 
admission. 

In  one  of  his  last  papers,  that  on  "Bradley  or 
Bergson,"  James  takes  a  shrewd  pleasure  in 
tracing  their  resemblances  as  far  as  they  go,  and 

184 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

then  laments  that  they  diverge,  because  if  they 
had  kept  together  they  could  between  them 
have  buried  post-Kantian  rationalism.  For  a 
complexity  of  partisanship  in  unity  that  can  not 
be  surpassed!  But  James's  ^willingness  to  be 
pallbearer  at  the  funeral  of  a  philosophic  idea 
was  not  inconsonant  with  his  determination  that 
some  other  ideas  of  doubtful  character  should 
be  allowed  to  grow  up  and  thrive.  For  the  old 
idea  had  had  its  say.  The  new  ideas  might  be 
strangled  in  infancy.  Let  each  new  idea  have 
its  time  and  opportunity.  Let  everything  be 
tried.  It  is  better  to  be  credulous  than  bigoted, 
but  to  be  excessively  one  or  the  other  is  not  be- 
fitting a  philosopher. 

Aside  from  certain  technical  problems, 
James's  philosophic  attitude  was  always  deter- 
mined by  his  answer  to  the  question:  On  which 
side  lies  the  greater  force  and  fullness  of  life, 
the  possibility  of  richness,  novelty,  adventure? 
In  1895,  ^t  the  height  of  his  power  as  a  man — 
though  perhaps  he  grew  wiser  as  he  grew  older 
— he  ends  a  paper  on  "Degeneration  and  Gen- 
ius" thus:  **The  real  lesson  of  the  genius-books 
is  that  we  should  welcome  sensibilities,  im- 
pulses, and  obsessions  if  we  have  them,  as  long 
as  by  their  means  the  field  of  our  experience 
grows  deeper  and  we  contribute  the  better  to 
the  race's  stores;  that  we  should  broaden  our 

185 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

notion  of  health  instead  of  narrowing  it;  that  we 
should  regard  no  single  element  of  weakness  as 
fatal — in  short,  that  we  should  not  be  afraid  of 
life/'  The  italics  are  his.  If  that  is  not  good 
psychological  argument,  then  there  is  something 
the  matter  with  the  science  of  psychology.  It  is 
only  just  such  good  sense  as  this  that  a  common 
man  can  understand,  and  the  humanity  and  elo- 
quence of  it  are  better  than  argument. 

Can  a  common  man  understand  philosophy? 
James  believed  that  he  can  both  understand  it 
and  express  it.  Two  or  three  times  he  quotes 
the  saying  of  his  friend  the  carpenter:  "There 
is  very  little  difference  between  one  man  and  an- 
other, but  what  little  difference  there  is  is  very 
important"  He  has  a  hot  contempt  for  Renan's 
cool  contempt  for  I'homme  vulgaire,  and  he  ad- 
mires Clifford's  "lavishly  generous  confidence 
in  the  worthiness  of  average  human  nature  to 
be  told  all  the  truth,  the  lack  of  which  in  Goe- 
the made  him  an  inspiration  to  the  few  but  a 
cold  riddle  to  the  many" — and  the  possession  of 
which  by  James  made  him  a  greater  teacher  of 
youth. 

He  was  an  instinctive  democrat  and  was  al- 
ways on  the  side  of  what,  in  his  social  environ- 
ment, was  the  unpopular  minority.  Like  Whit- 
man, of  whom  he  often  speaks  with  admiration, 
he  was  a  born  individual  aristocrat,  with  no  de- 

l86 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

lusions  about  the  intelligence  of  the  herd  but 
an  immense  faith  in  its  possibilities.  His  gen- 
erosity towards  the  delusions  of  common  men 
was  warmer  than  towards  the  delusions  of  phil- 
osophers, because  philosophers  have  opportun- 
ities for  study — and  should  know  better.  He 
had  only  one  fear,  which  sometimes  took  a  bel- 
ligerent form  (there  is  something  in  his  book 
on  psychology  about  the  relation  between  bel- 
ligerency and  fear)  ;  and  that  fear  was  lest  he 
or  some  other  philosopher  should  try  to  inter- 
fere with  a  possibly  good  idea,  to  put  sand,  not  on 
the  tracks,  but  in  the  machinery.  The  vaguely 
comforting  fatalistic  belief  that  good  ideas  will 
prevail  and  bad  ones  die  he  regarded  as  untrue 
to  the  history  of  human  thought,  and  not  good 
for  people  whose  business  it  is  to  express 
thought.  James  held  that  it  did  make  a  real  dif- 
ference in  the  world  that  a  saint  or  a  monster, 
St.  Paul  or  Bonaparte,  did  not  die  in  his  cradle. 
It  does  make  a  difference — the  one  illustration 
that  James  would  have  laughed  at — that  James 
lived  to  be  a  philosopher.  Ideas  do  sometimes 
seem  just  to  happen,  to  grow  without  human 
guidance,  but  the  precious  ideas  have  to  be 
fought  for.  Matthew  Arnold's  idea,  that  it  is 
our  duty  to  make  the  best  ideas  prevail,  may 
seem  priggish  and  dictatorial,  yet  fundamental- 
ly James  had  the  same  idea.  Pluralism,  he  says, 

187 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

is  not  for  sick  souls  but  for  those  in  whom  the 
fighting-spirit  is  alive.  Philosophy  does  not 
flourish  by  accident.   Men  make  it. 

Therefore,  philosophy  begins  in  the  human 
mind,  and  is  the  history  of  the  action  of  mind  on 
experience.  James  was  from  the  very  beginning 
a  student  of  the  human  mind.  He  began  in  epi: 
stemology  and  he  ended  there.  One  of  his  ear- 
liest essays  is  a  rather  too  easy  slipping  of  his 
knife  into  the  "operose  ineptitude"  of  Spencer's 
definition  of  mind,  and  his  last  word  about  a 
philosophic  puzzle  was:  ''We  shall  not  under- 
stand these  alterations  of  consciousness  either  in 
this  generation  or  the  next." 

The  right  self-contradiction  consists  not  in 
turning  in  obedience  to  others,  but  in  going 
against  the  wind  from  whichever  direction  it 
blows.  James  attacked  the  too-much  in  any 
philosophy,  even  his  own.  To  the  over-credu- 
lous he  preached  caution;  to  the  over-sceptical, 
faith.  This  sort  of  antagonism  between  two 
ideas  is  not  contradiction  but  balance  of  mind. 
Apropos  Professor  Schiller  and  others  he  de- 
mands an  "all-round  statement  in  classic  style," 
and,  himsell  the  jolliest  joker  that  ever  was  in 
philosophy,  he  recommends  that  Mr.  Schiller 
"tone  down  a  little  the  exuberance  of  his  po- 
lemic wit."  But  to  the  too  sober  he  says,  "Our 
errors  are  not  such  awfully  solemn  things.    A 

i88 


WILLIAM  JAMES,  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

certain  lightness  of  heart  seems  healthier  than 
this  excessive  nervousness  in  their  behalf." 

As  a  philosopher,  James  had  to  use  the  terms 
peculiar  to  his  craft,  but  he  so  strongly  sus- 
tained those  terms  in  a  structure  of  words  which 
can  be  fond  in  a  pocket-dictionary  that  the  pecu- 
liar terms  of  the  craft  become  intelligible  to 
simple  literate  men,  and  it  may  be  that  thereby 
they  become  more  intelligible  as  mere  philoso- 
phic terms.  Like  Bergson  he  is  a  poet  and  a 
humorist  in  his  analogies  and  illustrations. 
When  we  read  that  "the  feeling  of  'q'  knows 
whatever  reality  it  resembles,"  many  of  us,  in- 
cluding the  philosophers,  I  suspect,  are  lost  in 
the  dark.  But  when  we  read  that  "the  Kilkenny 
cats  of  fable  could  leave  a  residuum  in  the  shape 
of  their  undevoured  tails,  but  the  Kilkenny  cats 
of  existence  as  it  appears  in  the  pages  of  Hegel 
are  all-devouring,  and  leave  no  residuum" — 
then  we  begin  to  believe  that  philosophy  may  be 
a  human  and  amusing  study  and  that  to  be  great 
in  philosophy  it  is  not  necessary  always  to  be 
thinking  of  the  other  side  of  the  moon. 


189 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  POE 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  POE 

The  biography  of  Poe  got  a  wrong  start  im- 
mediately after  his  death  when  Griswold  slan- 
dered him  or  at  least  put  a  false  emphasis  on 
certain  aspects  of  his  character.  Since  then, 
every  book  about  Poe  has  had  an  argumentative 
tone,  a  defensive  spirit,  which  in  a  way  is  as  un- 
fair to  Poe  as  was  the  first  misrepresentation. 
One  sometimes  feels  like  crying:  "For  heaven's 
sake  read  his  work  and  let  the  man  alone!"  Yet 
it  is  not  possible  to  let  Poe  alone  if  you  have  once 
looked  into  his  life;  his  story  is  one  of  the  fas- 
cinating chapters  of  literary  history.  Professor 
Smith  says  that  his  book,  "Edgar  Allen  Poe, 
How  to  Know  Him,"  "is  an  attempt  to  substi- 
tute for  the  travesty  the  real  Poe,  to  suggest  at 
least  the  diversity  of  his  interests,  his  future- 
mindedness,  his  sanity,  and  his  humanity."  On 
the  whole.  Professor  Smith's  attempt  is  success- 
ful and  he  does  help  us  to  realize  Poe's  person- 
ality, "that  co-ordination  of  thought  and  mood 
and  conduct,  of  social  action  and  reaction,  of 
daily  interest  and  aim,"  which  Professor  Smith 
justly  says,  "finds  no  portrayal  in  the  biograph- 
ies of  Poe." 

193 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

It  is  an  odd  fact  that  after  Griswold  two  of 
the  more  authoritative  biographers  of  Poe  did 
not  like  him.  One  was  Richard  Henry  Stod- 
dard; the  other,  Mr.  George  E.  Woodberry. 
Neither  one,  I  suspect,  chose  Poe  as  a  congenial, 
or  even  as  an  interesting  subject.  The  task  of 
writing  his  biography  seems  to  have  fallen  to 
both  men  as  a  literary  chore ;  to  Stoddard  as  an 
official  critic  who  knew  Poe,  and  to  Mr.  Wood- 
berry  as  a  rising  young  man  of  literary  talent 
who  thirty  years  ago  was  selected  by  the  editor 
of  the  "American  Men  of  Letters"  to  write  the 
life  of  Poe.  Of  course,  Mr.  Woodberry  is  a 
competent  workman.  When,  in  the  year  of 
Poe's  centennial,  he  enlarged  his  "Life"  to  two 
volumes,  he  put  together  in  a  judicial,  objective 
style  probably  all  the  facts  that  we  need  to 
know.  But  his  aesthetic  judgments  are  at  best 
unsympathetic.  It  may  be  that  the  lyric  "To 
Helen"  has  been  overpraised,  though  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  understand  how  there  can  be  too  much 
praise  for  a  masterpiece.  And  when  Mr.  Wood- 
berry says  of  our  American  writers  that  they 
were  concerned  "not  with  the  transitory,  but  the 
eternal;  and,  excepting  Poe,  they  were  all  ar- 
tists of  the  beautiful,"  we  seem  to  have  an  ex- 
ample of  that  sort  of  moralistic  aesthetics  which 
sounds  lofty  but  is  only  bosh.   "If  Poe  was  not 

194 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  POE 

an  artist  of  the  beautiful,"  Professor  Smith 
asks,  "what  was  he  an  artist  of?" 

That  is  a  good,  sensible  question  and  Profess- 
or Smith's  answer,  if  not  as  eloquent  as  some 
things  that  have  been  written  by  Poe's  Europ- 
ean admirers,  is  sound  and  appreciative.  If  it 
be  an  American  tendency  to  overrate  our  na- 
tional men  of  genius,  we  have  certainly  not  dis- 
played that  tendency  in  relation  to  the  Amer- 
ican writer  who  more  than  any  other  has  cap- 
tured the  imagination  of  Europeans,  for  un- 
doubtedly the  finest  criticism  of  Poe  has  come 
from  our  brethren  overseas.  Stoddard  had  but 
a  grudging  sense  of  Poe's  merits  and  ends  his 
account  with  a  remark  which  contains  a  partial 
truth  but  which,  although  it  is  quoted  from  Dr. 
Johnson,  is  a  flat  anti-climax:  "All  that  can  be 
told  with  certainty  is  that  he  was  poor."  There 
S/eems  to  be  a  good  deal  more  to  tell  than  that, 
and,  indeed,  the  implications  of  Poe's  poverty, 
as  it  affected  the  artist,  are  better  expressed  by 
Stoddard  himself  when  he  says  that  Poe  "wrote 
with  fastidious  difficulty,  and  in  a  style  too 
much  above  the  popular  level  to  be  well  paid." 

American  criticism  of  Poe  is  thick  with  mor- 
alisms.  Thus  ftowell  wrote:  "As  a  critic  Mr. 
Poe  was  aesthetically  deficient  ...  he  seemed 
wanting  in  the  faculty  of  perceiving  the  pro- 
founder  ethics  of  art."    But,  we  may  well  ask, 

195 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

what  is  "the  profounder  ethics  of  art,"  and  who, 
except  a  New  England  preacher,  wants  to  be 
bothered  with  it  in  lyric  poetry?  Poe  alway? 
focused  his  attention  on  beauty,  on  excellence  of 
workmanship,  both  in  the  work  of  other  crafts- 
men and  in  his  own.  The  Scottish  critic,  Mr. 
John  M.  Robertson,  seems  to  be  nearer  the 
truth  than  Lowell  when  he  says  that  Poe  "has 
left  a  body  of  widely  various  criticism  which, 
as  such,  will  better  stand  critical  examination 
to-day  than  any  similar  work  produced  in  Eng- 
land or  America  in  his  time."  I  am  glad  to  see 
that  Professor  Smith  regards  Mr.  Robertson's 
essay  on  Poe  as  "the  ablest  brief  treatment  in 
any  language."  The  only  exception,  which  Mr. 
Robertson  himself  would  be  the  first  to  make, 
is  the  essay  by  the  French  critic  Emile  Hen- 
nequin. 

But  Professor  Smith  does  not  quite  escape 
American  moralism  in  his  effort  to  accentuate 
Poe's  virtues.  He  makes  too  much  of  Poe's  in- 
terest in  religion,  which  was  surely  nothing  but 
a  purely  intellectual  and  critical  interest,  and 
his  recurrent  emphasis  on  Poe's  Americanism 
is  too  tiresomely  patriotic  even  for  a  professor 
in  the  United  States  Naval  Academy.  Poe  was 
keen  for  the  best  interests  of  American  litera- 
ture, zealous  in  searching  out  any  note  of  prom- 
ise in  a  new  poet  and  in  pointing  to  the  weak 
spots  in  men  of  acknowledged  talent.   He  some- 

196 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  POE 

times  exhibits  a  kind  of  local  Southern  patriot- 
ism which  does  not  much  interest  us  now.  But 
on  the  whole,  he  was  detached  from  the  issues 
of  politics,  an  unlocalized,  almost  disembodied 
genius  whose  apparition  in  the  United  States  of 
America  is  still  an  endless  wonder  to  European 
critics. 

One  possible  influence  of  Poe's  environment 
on  his  art  Professor  Smith  is,  so  far  as  I  know, 
the  first  to  point  out;  and  it  is  a  very  valuable 
suggestion,  even  if  it  can  not  be  thoroughly 
proved.  In  Virginia,  more  than  in  any  other 
American  State,  the  English  and  Scots  ballads 
survive  by  oral  tradition.  It  is  possible  that  as 
a  child  Poe  heard  these  ballads  recited  or  sung, 
and  from  them  derived  his  sense  of  refrain  and 
repetition.  To  the  influence  of  the  ballad  Pro- 
fessor Smith  adds  the  possible  influence  of  plan- 
tation melodies  as  "subsidiary  sources  of  Poe's 
lyrical  technique."  He  is  certainly  right  in 
thinking  that  Poe's  originality  consists  not  in 
the  contribution  of  a  new  form  to  poetry  but 
in  his  individual  development  of  forms  already 
established.  His  charm  resides  in  the  color  of 
his  words  rather  than  in  the  shape  of  his  stanzas. 
But  of  course  the  two  things  are  inseparable 
and  whoever  tries  to  analyse  them  is  hopelessly 
baffled.  Poe's  own  attempt  to  explain  how  the 
trick  is  done  is  far  from  explaining  it,  and  if  he 

197 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

could  not  expound  in  prose  the  secret  of  poetry, 
nobody  can. 

For  Poe  was  first  and  always  a  critic,  inquis- 
itive of  methods,  and  making  his  effects  with 
cool  calculation.  Even  if  his  tales  of  horror  no 
longer  give  us  the  creeps,  they  will  always 
give  to  any  one  who  cares  about  writing,  that 
shiver  of  pleasure  which  comes  when  we  watch 
a  dexterous  craftsman  at  work.  Professor  Smith 
calls  Poe  the  "father  of  the  short  story,"  but  he 
came  too  late  to  be  credited  with  such  paternity. 
After  all,  Boccaccio  and  whoever  made  *'The 
Arabian  Nights"  lived  long  before  Poe,  and  in 
Poe's  stories  are  evident  traces  of  old  tales  of 
magic  and  mystery.  What  Poe  did  was  to  ra- 
tionalize the  short  story  so  highly,  in  some 
cases,  as  to  sacrifice  the  illusion  of  spontaneity 
which  is  one  of  the  merits  of  a  tale  that  seems 
to  tell  itself. 

With  the  purpose  of  suggesting  the  range  of 
Poe's  intellectual  interest  and  of  classifying 
some  of  his  miscellaneous  work  that  does  not 
fall  into  certain  obvious  groups.  Professor 
Smith  has  adopted  the  term  "frontiersman." 
The  image  evoked  by  that  word  somehow  does 
not  fit  Poe.  He  was,  in  a  sense,  an  explorer  of 
ideas,  and  he  had  a  genuine  gift  for  philosophy 
which  he  did  not  live  to  develop.  We  could 
spare  many  of  his  short  stories  rather  than  lose 

198 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  POE      ' 

''Eureka."  If  it  is  not  profound  philosophy  and 
if  it  docs  not  solve  the  riddle  of  the  universe,  it 
is  profound  in  its  beauty,  a  prose  poem.  Poe's 
science  is  obsolete,  no  doubt,  and  even  in  the 
science  of  his  day  he  was  little  more  than  an 
amateur.  But  the  mark  of  a  great  intellect  is  on 
every  page.  An  amazing  mind!  He  succeeded 
in  all  forms  of  literary  art  which  he  tried.  If 
the  poet  or  the  critic  or  the  short-story  writer 
should  be  obliterated,  there  would  still  remain 
a  man  of  genius. 

Critics  and  biographers  of  Poe,  like  Poe  him- 
self, cannot  let  his  drink  alone.  They  deny  or 
blame  or  pity  without  understanding.  The  ques- 
tion of  Poe  and  alcohol  seems  to  have  been  fin- 
ally answered  by  a  California  physician,  John 
W.  Robertson,  in  a  book  which  I  have  not  seen 
but  which  I  know  only  through  reviewers'  ac- 
counts of  it.  This  physician  finds  from  the  evi- 
dence that  Poe  was  a  dipsomaniac.  Dipsomania 
is  not  drunkenness  nor  riotous  dissipation;  it  is 
a  disease.  Poe,  like  other  victims  of  the  disease, 
had  to  have  periodic  bouts  with  the  demon,  got 
fearfully  sick,  and  when  he  recovered  stayed 
cold  sober  until  his  next  attack.  This  accounts 
for  Poe's  written  anathemas  against  alcohol, 
which  puzzled  Remy  de  Gourmont.  De  Gour- 
mont  says:  '*Il  ne  pouvait  plus  travailler  que 
dans    I' hallucination   de  Vivresse."     Quite   the 

199 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

contrary  is  the  case.  Poe  could  not  do  a  stroke 
of  work  under  the  inspiration  of  whiskey;  he 
was  not  one  of  those  mad  geniuses  who  con- 
ceive masterpieces  in  a  tavern  or  with  a  bottle 
beside  the  ink-pot.  That  is  proved,  or  indicated, 
by  his  critical  clarity,  the  almost  passionless  ra- 
tionality of  his  tales  and  poems,  and  even  by  the 
physical  perfection  of  his  manuscripts.  He 
worked  between  his  joyless  debauches,  and  he 
worked  hard.  His  melancholy  and  love  of  ter- 
ror, his  preoccupation  with  defects  of  will  and 
remorse,  whatever  "morbidity"  there  is  in  his 
writings,  may  have  some  relation  to  his  disease. 
But  as  an  artist  he  achieved  his  dark  effects  by 
sheer  force  of  intellect  in  hours  of  clear-eyed 
sobriety.  Only  in  a  literary  sense  is  he  the  au- 
thor of  "MS.  Found  in  a  Bottle." 


200 


OTATE  TEACKEr?;«  C 
SANTA  BAK£ARA      - 


^?f/ 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN. 

The  one  fault  that  can  be  found  with  Trau- 
bel's  "With  Walt  Whitman  in  Camden"  is  that 
there  is  too  much  of  it.  But  that  is  a  fault  easily 
remedied  without  blotting  a  line  of  the  record. 
Books  that  contain  too  little  may  cheat  us  of 
desired  knowledge,  whereas  books  that  contain 
too  much  can  do  no  harm;  every  reader  has  the 
privilege  of  not  reading  at  all  or  of  dipping  in- 
to a  book  here  and  there.  Traubel's  method  is 
admirable;  it  is  that  of  a  documentary  historian. 
He  set  down  Whitman's  talk  and  such  impres- 
sions and  facts  as  the  biographer  recorded  at  the 
moment,  and  he  reproduced  the  letters  in  the 
order  in  which  Whitman  gave  them  to  him.  He 
did  not  presume  to  select  from  Whitman's  con- 
versation what  now  seems  most  interesting  or 
most  to  Whitman's  credit,  but  he  gave  you  all 
that  he  had  for  you  to  enjoy  or  ignore  and  for 
other  biographers  and  historians  to  make  use  of 
as  they  will. 

Traubel  made  no  concessions  to  the  fact  that 
readers  have  to  catch  trains  and  read  other 
books,  and  he  ignored,  perhaps  to  his  personal 

203 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

disadvantage,  certain  exigencies  of  publication, 
such  as  the  publisher's  obvious  need  to  interest 
as  many  people  as  possible  with  the  least  pos- 
sible expenditure.  Traubel's  method  is  simple 
from  an  artistic  point  of  view,  requiring  nothing 
but  accuracy,  courage  and  industry.  Yet  the 
method  is  a  great  strain  on  all  concerned.  Trau- 
bel  could  stand  it.  Evidently  the  publishers 
thought  they  could  stand  it.  The  reader  can 
stand  it,  because,  as  I  have  said,  he  can  take  as 
much  or  as  little  as  suits  him.  The  real  ques- 
tion is  whether  Whitman  can  stand  it.  And  the 
amazing  man  can  stand  it.  Consider  that  in  the 
years  when  Traubel  knew  him  Whitman  was 
an  invalid,  broken  by  his  services  as  nurse  and 
brother  of  soldiers  during  the  war.  He  was  a 
garrulous  old  man  talking  to  men  who  loved 
him  and  who,  though  no  servile  worshippers  of 
him  or  anyone  else,  encouraged  him  to  reminis- 
cence and  the  utterance  of  offhand  opinion.  Now 
that  is  a  severe  test.  Not  many  old  men,  even 
men  of  great  achievement  in  action  or  art,  could 
last  for  more  than  a  small  volume.  Whitman  is 
worth  these  hundreds  and  hundreds  of  pages. 
For  he  was  a  great  talker,  full  of  experience  and 
endowed  with  the  gift  of  speech.  Almost  every 
day,  according  to  Traubel's  record,  he  hit  off 
an  interesting  idea  and  turned  it  in  a  Whitman- 
ese  way.    He  repeats  himself.     He   makes    re- 

204 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN 

marks  that  do  not  amount  to  much.  But  he  is 
never  a  bore.  Line  by  line  he  and  Traubel,  ego- 
tists both,  but  honest,  thoughtful,  artfully  inar- 
tistic, have  drawn  a  portrait,  the  like  of  which 
is  not  to  be  found.  For  once  a  literary  man  is  as 
big  as  his  literary  work.  Traubel  was  a  very 
happy  biographer,  for  he  had  a  sort  of  mono- 
poly of  a  great  subject,  and  he  had  not  the  slight- 
est temptation  to  omit  or  defend. 

An  admirer  has  called  Traubel's  work  "the 
most  truthful  biography  in  the  language."  To 
use  the  informal  mode  of  Walt  Whitman  and 
of  his  biographer,  that  ain't  exactly  so.  It  ain't 
the  most  truthful  biography;  it's  simply  a  true 
biography. 

"Lincoln,"  said  Whitman,  "don't  need  ador- 
ers, worshippers — he  needs  friends.  .  .  .  The 
great  danger  with  Lincoln  for  the  next  fifty 
years  will  be  that  he  will  be  overdone,  over-ex- 
plained, over-exploited — made  a  good  deal  too 
much  of — gather  about  himself  a  rather  myth- 
ical aureole."  From  such  danger  Traubel  did 
his  best  to  protect  Whitman;  the  biogra- 
pher's multitudinous  veracity  preserves  a  real 
man  and  is  a  heavy  impediment  to  the  critic  and 
literary  historian  of  the  future  who  may  try  to 
disobey  Whitman's  injunction  not  to  "prettify" 
him.  If  that  impossible  and  tedious  universe, 
the  "whole"  truth,  is  not  comprehended  in  these 

205 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

prolific  pages,  the  errors  and  omissions  are  due 
not  to  the  biographer,  but  to  Whitman  himself, 
who  had  a  silent  as  well  as  a  loquacious  side;  he 
had  unexplained  depths  which  probably  he  did 
not  understand  himself.  When  he  spoke  he  tried 
to  say  what  he  thought,  but  often  he  did  not 
speak  at  all,  and  at  least  once  he  said  to  Trau- 
bel :  "I  don't  care  to  talk  about  that." 

The  writer  of  fiction  may  invent  substance  to 
fit  an  artistic  scheme.  The  compiler  of  facts 
may,  under  certain  conditions,  disregard  liter- 
ary form.  The  biographer  or  the  historian  who 
will  have  his  work  read  must  play  skilfully  be- 
tween the  double  restriction  of  substance  and 
form.  He  must  be  at  once  man  of  science  and 
artist.  Because  of  its  very  great  difficulties,  be- 
cause of  the  high  demands  it  makes  upon  the 
writer,  biography  is  rarely  well  done.  One  can 
name  few  masterpieces  of  biography  in  English. 
Perhaps  the  only  masterpiece  that  everybody 
will  name  is  BoswelTs  Johnson,  that  extraordi- 
nary performance  which  heaved  literary  history 
out  of  shape  and  keeps  it  in  a  permanent  state 
of  distortion.  For  Johnson  was  not  a  first-rate 
man  of  letters;  he  wrote  little  that  is  even  toler- 
able to  read;  his  letter  to  Chesterfield  and  the 
preface  to  the  Dictionary  are  his  most  vital  pro- 
ductions. Moreover,  Boswell  was  a  foreordain- 
ed  nonentity.    Yet  he  was  a  great    artist    and 

206 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN 

Johnson  was  a  great  person,  and  the  two  of  them 
made  a  great  book;  it  is  a  puzzle  which  makes 
one  fall  back,  outwitted,  to  the  last  ditch  of  ad- 
fectives. 

Whitman's  opinion  of  Johnson  is  interesting, 
if  only  in  relation  to  his  own  biographer's 
methods.  Johnson  knew  that  Boswell  was  making 
notes.  Traubel,  whose  word  is  infallibly  good, 
says  that  Whitman  did  not  know  that  his  bio- 
grapher was  keeping  a  record.  Whitman  did 
know  that  Traubel  would  write  about  him  and 
he  selected  the  letters  and  other  documents  for 
the  "archives."  But  he  was  not  aware  that 
Traubel  was  making  a  diary.  Therefore  when 
he  talked  he  was  free  at  least  from  the  con- 
straint imposed  on  a  man  who  knows  that  his 
spoken  words  are  to  appear  in  print. 

When  Whitman  was  69  years  old  he  began 
to  read  Boswell ;  he  refers  to  him  a  dozen  times 
in  the  course  of  the  year,  thereby  showing  that 
Boswell  interested  him,  for  when  Whitman  was 
not  interested  in  a  book  he  simply  forgot  it.  He 
thought  that  Johnson  "talked  for  effect — seemed 
rather  inclined  to  bark  men  down,  like  the  big- 
gest dog — indeed,  a  spice  of  dishonesty  palpably 
possessed  him.  Johnson  tried  rather  to  impress 
than  to  be  true."  "He  was  on  stilts  always — he 
belongs  to  the  self-conscious  literary  class,  who 
iive  in  a  house  of  rules  and  never  get  into  the 

207 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

open  air."  However,  note  this  significant  con- 
fession: "I  read  it  through,  looked  it  through, 
rather — persisted  in  spite  of  fifty  temptations  to 
throw  it  down.  I  don't  know  who  tried  me  most 
— -Johnson  or  Boswell.  The  book  lasts — it  seems 
to  have  elements  of  life — but  I  will  do  nothing 
to  pass  it  on."  There  is  the  comment  of  the  lion 
on  the  bear.  No,  these  zoological  metaphors 
are  quite  false.  Benevolent  and  burly  male  per- 
sons are  not,  even  by  Whitmanian  identifica- 
tions, to  be  named  with  the  brutes. 

Some  day  a  biographer  with  the  right  talent 
and  in  possession  of  all  Traubel's  material,  cog- 
nizant of  social  ideals  and  facts  and  sensitive 
to  poetry,  will  write  a  good  life  of  Whitman.  So 
far  as  I  know,  there  is  no  satisfactory  biography 
of  our  one  magnificent  American  poet.  Traubel 
was  not  able  to  do  it.  He  was  properly  employed 
in  gathering  and  publishing  the  fundamental 
record.  Moreover,  his  style,  perfectly  fitted  to 
short  hand  notes,  is,  in  continuous  composition, 
abominable.  I  loved  him  with  all  my  Whit- 
manian heart  and  read  him,  because  of  every 
four  of  his  sentences  one  says  something  worth 
while.  But  ten  sentences  of  his  in  a  row  hurt 
like  a  corduroy  road.  I  have  to  get  out  and  walk 
and  rub  myself. 

Several  literary  men  have  tried  to  write  Whit- 
man's life  and  they  have  failed.    Professor  Bliss 

208 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN 

Perry's  book  is  fatuous.  He  had  no  excuse  to 
write  about  Whitman  at  all,  except  in  so  far 
forth  as  a  publisher's  request  to  an  alleged  liter- 
ary man  to  do  a  book  for  an  established  series 
furnishes  a  practical  excuse. 

The  critical  study  of  Whitman  by  Mr.  Basil 
De  Selincourt  is  sympathetic  and  discerning  as 
regards  what  may  be  called  the  purely  literary 
side.  He  understands  what  Whitman  says  and 
takes  him  for  granted  as  one  of  the  world's  sup- 
reme poets.  He  conceives  the  essential  unity  of 
Whitman's  thought,  a  unity  that  should  be  ob- 
vious but  evidently  is  not  to  some  readers  and 
critics  who  treat  Whitman  as  a  collection  of 
more  or  less  impressive  fragments.  Mr.  De  Sel- 
incourt's  analysis  of  Whitman's  form  is  instruc- 
tive, appreciative,  though  a  trifle  academic,  not 
wholly  emancipated  from  schoolroom  rules  of 
prosody.  If  you  will  read  Whitman  aloud,  pro- 
nouncing the  words  as  they  are  pronounced  in 
prose,  and  emphasizing  them  according  to  the 
sense,  the  scansion  will  take  care  of  itself.  When 
a  line  is  bad  (and  Whitman,  like  most  of  the 
other  great  poets,  wrote  bad  lines)  it  won't  work 
by  any  effort  of  elocution.  The  good  lines,  if 
you  have  an  ear  in  your  head  and  a  tongue  in 
your  mouth,  chant  themselves,  and  you  can  for- 
get all  about  iambics  and  hexameters. 

Where  Mr.  De  Selincourt  fails  is  in  his  ac- 
209 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

count  of  Whitman's  notions  of  liberty,  demo- 
cracy, America,  the  future.  Book-people  do  not 
understand  these  things,  especially  English 
book-people,  who  assume  that  America  pro- 
duced Whitman  because  it  was  a  land  of  liberty. 
It  was  not.  It  was,  like  the  rest  of  the  world,  a 
land  of  plutocracy,  convention,  servility.  It  is 
complimentary  to  us  but  unhappily  not  true  to 
say  that  "America  stands  for  the  passionate  re- 
assertion  of  certain  beliefs  which  life,  to  those 
who  look  back  upon  it,  seems  always  to  stultify, 
but  which,  to  those  who  can  look  forward,  ap- 
pears as  the  very  spirit  and  power  of  life  itself 
— 'the  urge,  the  ardour,  the  unconquerable 
will'." 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  America  does  not  stand 
for  any  such  thing  and  Whitman  does  not  stand 
for  America.  He  is  a  revolutionist  in  revolt 
against  the  American  iact  and  celebrating  a. 
possible  American  future.  Official  America 
tried  to  throttle  him.  Conventional  America 
ignored  him.  Literary  and  revolutionary  spirits 
in  England  and  America  welcomed  him,  for 
they  are  free  spirits,  intellectually  free,  under 
any  economic  conditions  and  in  any  part  of  the 
world.  Whitman  himself  did  not  understand 
why  he  was  acclaimed  in  England  by  more  men 
and  better  men  than  in  America.  It  was  simply 
because  English  thinkers,  writers,  poets,  with 

210 


BIOGRAPHIES  OF  WHITMAN 

minds  capable  of  appreciating  him,  outnumbered 
their  American  brothers  ten  to  one. 

Two  American  ladies  once  called  on  Tenny- 
son. He  asked  them  whether  they  knew  Walt 
Whitman.  They  confessed  that  they  did  not. 
"Then,"  said  he,  "you  do  not  know  the  greatest 
man  in  America." 


211 


GEORGE  E.  WOODBERRY 


GEORGE  E.  WOODBERRY.  ' 

A  man's  place  in  the  generations  of  mankind 
is  not  wholly  determined  by  the  date  of  his 
birth.  If  William  James  were  alive  he  would 
be  eighty  years  old ;  but  he  belongs  to  us,  to  the 
living  present.  Mr.  George  Edward  Wood- 
berry  is  only  sixty-seven;  yet  he  already  seems 
like  the  last  figure  in  a  tradition  which  has 
come  to  an  end — so  far  as  any  period  in  liter- 
ature may  truly  be  said  to  end.  James  was 
aware  of  something  like  this  twenty  years  ago. 
He  gave  Mr.  Woodberry  the  praise  that  is  his 
due,  but  expressed  at  the  same  time  his  essential 
weakness.  Of  "The  Heart  of  Man"  James  wrote 
in  a  letter: 

The  essays  are  grave  and  noble  in  the  extreme.  I  hail  another 
American  author.  They  can't  be  popular,  and  for  cause.  The 
respect  of  him  for  the  Queen's  English,  the  classic  leisureliness 
and  explicitness,  which  give  so  rare  a  dignity  to  his  style,  also 
take  from  it  that  which  our  generation  seems  to  need,  ,the 
sudden  word,  the  unmeditated  transition,  the  flash  of  perception 
that  makes  reasonings  unnecessary.  Poor  Woodberry,  so  high, 
so  true,  so  good,  so  original  in  his  total  make-up,  and  yet  so 
unoriginal  if  you  take  him  spot-wise — and  therefore  so  ineffective. 

Mr.  Woodberry  is  not  out  of  date  in  a  mere 
journalistic  sense  or  in  the  hasty  judgment  of  an 
irreverent  generation  which   affects    a    trivial 

215 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

contemporaniety  and  regards  even  the  end  of 
the  last  century  as  old  fogy.  He  is  out  of  date 
because  he  did  not  gear  with  his  own  times,  but 
remained  aloof  and  backward-looking  and  so 
became  the  last  of  the  Lowells  instead  of  the  first 
of  the  Woodberrys.  It  could  not  have  been  a 
conscious  or  servile  emulation  on  his  part,  for  he 
has  a  spirit  of  his  own.  But  his  surroundings 
and  his  education  were  too  strong  for  his  fine 
talent.  He  was  brought  up  in  the  twilight  of  the 
New  England  demigods.  They  handed  him  the 
"torch,"  and  he  has  carried  it  with  pious  de- 
votion. To  younger  men  as  docile  as  himself, 
he  became,  almost  officially,  the  representative 
in  the  flesh  of  the  elders  over  whose  graves  he 
prayed.  His  publishers  announce  with  pride, 
with  no  sense  of  the  depressing  implications  of 
what  they  are  saying,  that  there  is  a  Woodberry 
Society,  "probably  the  '  only  organization  in 
America  dedicated  to  a  living  writer."  Thus 
the  anachronism  is  fulfilled.  Mr.  Woodberry 
was  old  when  he  was  young,  and  he  is  an  institu- 
tion before  he  is  dead.  Some  books  are  epoch 
making;  other  books,  even  great  and  original 
books,  lie  comfortably  in  their  times  without  be- 
ing either  innovative  or  conclusive;  Mr.  Wood- 
bery's  six  solid  volumes*  are  epoch  closing,  a 

*Collected    Essays    of    George    Edward    Woodberry.      6    vols. 
New  York:  Harcourt,  Brace  and  Company.     1921. 

2l6 


GEORGE  E.  WOODBERRY 

collection  of  such  words  as  will  not  be  written 
again  by  a  man  of  genuine  talent  and  wisdom. 

The  feeling  that  Mr.  Woodberry  is  a  voice 
from  the  past  that  immediately  preceded  him 
comes  over  me  most  heavily  when  I  read  his  es- 
says on  Lowell's  Addresses,  on  Democracy,  and 
on  Wendell  Phillips.  It  may  be  only  the  essay- 
ist's strict  fidelity  to  Lowell's  ideas — no  doubt 
a  merit — which  leaves  the  impression  that  the 
essayist  knows  only  what  Lowell  knew  and  no 
more,  that  the  pupil  has  not  moved  a  step  be- 
yond the  master.  It  is  Lowell  over  again  with- 
out the  slightest  addition  from  the  lessons  of 
time.  The  London  Nation  has  said  of  Mr. 
Woodberry's  essays  that  most  of  them  have  "a 
unity  and  life  that  make  many  of  Lowell's  seem 
those  of  a  shrewd  but  old-fashioned  amateur.'* 
Yet  Lowell  was  at  least  a  vivid  amateur,  who 
expressed  something  that  belonged  to  the  'fifties, 
'sixties  and  'seventies ;  and  he  had  an  old  gentle- 
man's right  to  be  old  in  the  'eighties.  It  is  not 
to  be  expected  that  a  critic  should  begin  where 
Lowell  leaves  off — only  a  thinker  of  real  genius 
makes  such  long  strides.  But  the  critic  follow- 
ing Lowell  in  time  and  not  moving  half  a  step 
ahead  of  him  seems  older  than  Lowell  himself. 

The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  address  on  Wen- 
dell Phillips,  "The  Faith  of  an  American."  It 
is  fine,  even  eloquent,  but  it  is  abstract  and  cu- 

217 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

riously  old-fashioned.  Phillips  in  his  own  utter- 
ances is  more  of  to-day  and  of  to-morrow  than 
is  his  eulogist  who  was  a  child  in  Beverley  when 
Phillips  was  in  mid-career.  The  reason,  of 
course,  is  that  Phillips  was  a  fighter,  hot  with 
real  issues,  and  it  is  not  the  critic's  business  to 
fight  but  to  examine  the  ideas  of  the  fighter. 
These  ideas  necessarily  become  somewhat  ab- 
stract when  a  critic  quotes  or  rephrases  them, 
especially  since  Phillips  was  an  orator  and  flung 
at  his  audiences  sweeping  generalities  which  in 
a  less  inspired  man  are  mere  tall  talk.  But  Mr. 
Woodberry  devitalizes  Phillips,  especially  the 
later  Phillips  who  went  on  from  one  issue  to  the 
next  until  he  dropped.  Mr.  Woodberry  has  not 
a  single  clear,  plain  word  about  one  of  Phillips' 
last  fights,  that  for  the  Labor  party.  Mr. 
Woodberry  stops  with  the  actual  Phillips  before 
Phillips  stopped,  and  the  end  of  the  address 
fades  out  in  vagueness  and  platitude.  There  is 
something  rather  touching  about  Mr.  Wood- 
berry's  declaration:  ^'I  know  that  what  I  have 
said  to-night  is  heavy  with  risk."  One  looks  in 
vain  to  discover  the  risk.  Surely  in  191 1,  when 
the  address  was  delivered,  a  man  might  talk  in 
Mr.  Woodberry's  mild  way  every  night  in  the 
week  and  invite  no  more  severe  punishment  than 
a  scolding  from  Dr.  Nicholas  Murray  Butler. 
Mr.  Woodberry's  ideas  and  his  expressions 
218 


GEORGE  E.  WOODBERRY 

are  all  gentle,  though  not  timid  nor  emasculate. 
His  general  faith  in  "Democracy"  is  too  serene- 
ly above  the  tumult  to  disturb  anybody  or  pro- 
voke a  riot  call  in  the  quietude  of  Beverley,  I 
do  not  know  vs^hat  he  means  by  "Democracy," 
whether  such  actual  democracy  as  existed  in 
America  in  1899,  or  some  beautiful  dream  of 
the  future.  If  democracy  is  a  dream,  an  unreal- 
ized dream,  then  any  beautiful  thing  a  poet  says 
about  it  is  true.  But  Mr.  Woodberry  seems  to 
be  talking  about  something  actually  existing, 
something  already  realized  in  considerable  part 
if  not  completely,  for  he  says:  "Democracy  has 
its  great  career,  for  the  first  time,  in  our  national 
being,  and  exhibits  here  most  purely  its  form- 
ative powers,  and  unfolds  destiny  on  the  grand 
scale."  That  was  not  true  twenty  years  ago,  and 
it  is  certainly  not  true  now.  It  is  the  sort  of 
thing  that  Emerson  and  Lowell  could  say  with 
rousing  conviction,  but  twenty  years  ago  it  was 
as  obsolete  as  a  beaver  hat  except  in  newspaper 
editorials  and  political  speeches,  where  it  is  still 
going  strong — even  if  not  quite  so  strong  as  it 
used  to  be. 

Mr.  Woodberry  seems  to  imply  that  he  is 
somewhat  more  of  a  realist  than  Lowell.  But 
he  is  in  fact  less  of  a  realist  than  Lowell;  for 
Lowell  in  his  time  did  grapple  with  the  facts 
of  politics.    In  poetry  it  is  not  necessary,  it  is 

219 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

better  not,  to  be  a  realist.  But  in  dealing  with 
politics  and  contemporaneous  history  the  true 
citizen  must  be  a  realist  and  leave  it  to  the  pol- 
iticians to  fly  with  the  eagle.  No  wisdom  is  to 
be  derived  from  such  a  statement  as  this :  "There 
is  always  an  ideality  of  the  human  spirit  in  all 
its  [Democracy's]  works,  if  one  will  search 
them  out."  Or  this:  "Democracy  is  a  mode  of 
dealing  with  souls."  Or  this:  "Not  that  other 
governments  have  not  had  regard  to  the  soul, 
but  in  democracy,  it  is  spirituality  that  gives  the 
law  and  rules  the  issue."  It  is,  alas,  not  true 
that  "education,  high  education  even,  is  more 
respected  and  counts  for  more  in  a  democracy 
than  under  the  older  systems,"  or  that  "the  law 
becomes  the  embodied  persuasion  of  the  com- 
munity," or  that  "all  these  blessings  [aversion 
to  war,  devotion  to  public  duty  and  many  other 
enumerated  virtues]  unconfined  as  the  element, 
belong  to  all  our  people." 

Mr.  Woodberry's  democracy  simply  does  not 
exist  and  never  did  exist.  Yet  there  is  one  exist- 
ent glory  of  my  country  which  I  believe  I  ap- 
preciate better  than  he  does.  He  says:  "It  be- 
hooves us,  especially,  to  be  modest,  for  our  mag- 
nificent America  has  never  yet  produced  a  poet 
even  of  the  rank  of  Gray."  That  was  written 
fourteen  years  after  the  death  of  Whitman.  Mr. 
Woodberry's  democracy  had  not  yet  come  along, 

220 


GEORGE  E.  WOODBERRY 

but  one  of  its  great  poets  had  arrived  and  de- 
parted leaving  Mr.  Woodberry  none  the  wiser. 
There  is  another  glory  of  my  country  which  I 
appreciate  better  than  Mr.  Woodberry  does — 
Poe,  whose  poetry  Mr,  Woodberry  has  never 
understood,  though  he  has  written  what  is  alto- 
gether the  best  biography  of  the  man!  To  save 
the  six  best  lyrics  of  Poe,  I  would,  if  such  a  sac- 
rifice were  necessary,  cheerfully  sink  Gray  in 
the  deepest  sea  of  oblivion,  "Elegy,"  letters  and 
all.  But  that  is  only  a  slight  difference  of  judg- 
ment, and  there  is  no  more  futile  business  than 
to  draw  up  minor  poets  in  grades  and  ranks. 
Whitman  is  another  matter;  the  critic  who 
misses  him  in  this  day  of  the  world  is  simply  in- 
competent. The  excuse  for  Mr.  Woodberry  is 
that  he  does  not  belong  to  this  day  of  the  world. 
There  is  something  pathetic  about  Mr,  Wood- 
berry's  patriotism.  He  sincerely  believes  that 
"America's  title  to  glory  is  her  service  to  human 
liberty."  He  has  never  been  delivered  from  the 
superstition  that  "the  sense  of  justice  is  the  bed- 
rock of  the  Puritan  soul" — the  Puritan  soul, 
narrow,  despotic,  cruelly  unjust!  But  when 
Mr.  Woodberry  leaves  politics  and  patriotism 
and  religion  and  returns  to  art  and  literature 
where  he  is  at  home,  he  puts  his  finger  ruefully 
on  the  real  rock  of  the  Puritan  soul,  recalling 
the  Puritan's  hostility  to  the  theatre  and  regret- 

2211 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

ting  "the  American  inhibition"  "which  rejects 
the  nude  in  sculpture  and  painting,  not  only  for- 
feiting thereby  the  supreme  of  Greek  genius  and 
sanity,  but  to  the  prejudice,  also,  of  human  dig- 
nity." Mr.  Woodberry  is  himself  a  Puritan, 
yearning  to  be  free  but  chained  to  New  Eng- 
land granite,  and  since  he  can  not  get  free  on 
this  planet  he  looks  up  to  the  heavens  where  the 
God  of  his  fathers  used  to  dwell,  but  where  he 
can  find  only  abstract  and  vague  ideas.  Mr. 
Woodberry's  tendency  to  abstract  phrases, 
which  on  pressure  yield  nothing,  vitiates  his  lit- 
erary essays,  the  essays  in  which  a  professional 
critic  ought  to  be  most  concrete,  definite,  and 
nourishing.  The  trouble  may  be  that  his  views 
are  too  high  and  too  broad  for  the  limited  vis- 
ion of  a  common  man;  but  I  think  his  trouble 
is  that  he  has  not  the  true  philosopher's  power 
to  make  a  long  idea,  bridging  time  and  space, 
stand  up  under  its  own  weight;  there  is  a  lack 
of  solid  timber  and  concrete.  His  best  essays 
are  those  on  individual  authors  in  which  he  has 
the  selected  specific  substance  of  another  man's 
thought  to  work  on.  As  ought  to  happen  to  a 
sensitive  critic,  it  sometimes  happens  that  Mr. 
Woodberry's  style  takes  the  very  tone  of  his  sub- 
ject. He  is  whimsical  in  his  charming  little  es- 
say on  Pepys,  an  adequate  trifle;  he  is  grave  and 
quiet  when  he  writes  about  Gray;  and  Swin- 

222 


GEORGE  E.  .WOODBERRY 

burne  so  stirs  him  that  his  prose  awakes  and 
sparkles  with  metaphor.  Even  in  this  essay, 
however,  he  can  not  help  demoralizing  poetry 
by  moralizing  it  into  pseudo-philosophic  prose. 
*'The  imagery  (of  'Laus  Veneris')  has  more 
affinity  with  modes  of  sacerdotal  art,  with  sym- 
bolism and  the  attributive  in  imaginative  power 
than  it  has  with  the  free  vitality  that  is  more 
properly  the  sphere  of  poetry."  What  does  that 
mean?  What  is  the  sphere  of  poetry?  The  es- 
says on  the  older  poets  would  make  first-rate  in- 
troductions to  school  texts,  and  I  think  some  of 
them  have  been  so  used.  They  suffer  from  the 
fact  that  in  Mr.  Woodberry's  time — and  since 
— so  many  standard  essays  on  Milton,  Shakes- 
peare, and  the  rest  were  written  and  rewritten, 
that  unless  a  critic  has  a  fresh  point  of  view,  as 
Mr.  Woodberry  has  not,  another  essay  is  simply 
another  essay. 

It  must  be  pleasant  to  meditate  on  the  great 
men  of  letters  and  from  time  to  time  write  an 
essay  on  Virgil  or  Montaigne  or  Matthew 
Arnold.  Some  leisure  is  necessary,  for  the  con- 
scientious critic  must  read  much,  and  much 
reading  takes  time.  It  may  be  that  in  our  nerv- 
ous age,  in  this  country,  the  scholarly  critic  with 
a  true  taste  for  letters  has  disappeared,  to  re- 
turn perhaps  in  a  day  when  JDemocracy  or 
something  better  shall  have  dawned.  The  com- 

223 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

fortable  old  tradition  is  dead  or  dying,  and  since 
its  good  works  are  extant  in  print,  we  need  no 
more  contributions  to  it.  As  Mr.  Woodberry 
says  in  an  essay  called  "Culture  of  the  Old 
School":  "The  Gentleman's  Magazine — both 
the  name  and  the  thing  belong  to  a  bygone 
time." 


224 


ABRAHAM  CAHAN 


ABRAHAM  CAHAN. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  last  century  there  ap- 
peared in  the  magazines  some  remarkable  stor- 
ies of  the  East  Side  of  New  York  by  Abraham 
Cahan.  They  were  not  of  the  crudely  comic 
type  of  Potash  and  Perlmutter,  nor  were  they 
in  the  somewhat  finer  mood  of  sentimental  hu- 
mor which  made  Myra  Kelly  deservedly  popu- 
lar. They  were  humorous  and  pathetic  in  a  quiet, 
compelling  way,  with  a  gentle  austerity  of  tone 
even  less  familiar  to  American  readers  then  than 
it  is  in  the  days  of  the  Russian  invasion.  Mr. 
Howells  praised  these  stories  and  he  and  others 
in  editorial  authority  encouraged  the  author  to 
write  more.  A  career  in  the  pleasant  art  of 
fiction  was  open  to  Mr.  Cahan.  But  he  with- 
drew from  it  and,  so  far  as  I  know,  he  wrote  no 
more  stories  for  at  least  ten  years.  He  has  de- 
voted his  energy  to  building  up  the  great  Jew- 
ish Daily  Forward,  which  is  not  only  the  voice 
of  the  East  Side,  but  a  powerful  vehicle  of  social 
and  political  ideals  that  have  not  yet  penetrated 
the  sanctums  of  Times  Square  and  of  the  older 
newspaper  world  near  City  Hall  and  Civic 
Virtue. 

227 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Then,  as  he  approached  sixty,  Mr.  Cahan 
gave  us  "The  Rise  of  David  Levinsky",  a  solid 
mature  novel,  into  which  are  compacted  the  re- 
flections of  a  lifetime.  The  publisher's  notice 
called  it  "a  story  of  success  in  the  turmoil  of 
American  life."  Probably  the  writer  of  those 
words  intended  to  help  the  book  by  the  appeal 
which  "success"  makes  to  the  American  mind, 
for  no  reader,  not  even  a  publisher's  clerk,  could 
miss  the  immense  irony  of  the  story.  It  is  in- 
deed the  story  of  a  failure.  The  vanity  of  great 
riches  was  never  set  forth  with  more  searching 
sincerity.  The  helplessness  of  the  individual, 
even  the  strong  and  prosperous,  in  the  economic 
whirlpool,  the  loneliness  and  disillusionment 
only  partly  assuaged  by  pride  in  commercial 
achievement,  the  sacrifice  of  the  intellectual  life 
to  the  practical,  these  are  the  fundamental  themes 
of  the  book.  Levinsky,  with  the  instincts  of 
a  scholar  and  a  desire  for  the  finest  things  in 
life,  is  swept  into  business  by  circumstances 
which  he  hardly  understands  himself  and 
against  which  he  is  powerless;  once  in  the  game 
he  makes  the  most  of  his  abilities,  but  he  never 
ceases  to  regard  his  visible  good  fortune  as  poor 
compensation  for  the  invisible  things  he  has 
missed.  His  wealth  forces  him  to  associate  with 
all  that  is  vulgar  and  acquisitive  in  Jewry  and 
isolates  him  from  all  that  is  idealistic.   He  finds 

228 


ABRAHAM  CAHAN 

that  he  cannot  even  speak  the  language  of  the 
woman  he  most  admires.  Worse  still,  he  is  out 
of  sympathy  with  the  aspirations  of  millions  of 
poor  Jews  from  whose  ranks  he  has  sprung.  He 
has  no  sympathy  with  those  who  would  break 
the  game  up  or  make  new  rules,  yet  he  sees  that 
the  game  is  hardly  worth  playing,  even  for  the 
winner.  "Success I  Success!  Success!  It  was  the 
almighty  goddess  of  the  hour.  Thousands  of 
new  fortunes  were  advertising  her  gaudy  splen- 
dors. Newspapers,  magazines,  and  public 
speeches  were  full  of  her  glory,  and  he  who 
found  favor  in  her  eyes  found  favor  in  the  eyes 
of  man." 

The  portrait  of  David  Levinsky  is  a  portrait 
of  society,  not  simply  of  the  Jewish  section  of 
it,  or  of  New  York,  but  of  American  business. 
And  business  is  business  whether  done  by  Jew 
or  Gentile.  If  Levinsky  is  a  triumphant  failure, 
he  is  so  because  American  business,  which  shaped 
him  to  its  ends,  is,  viewed  from  any  decent 
regard  for  humanity,  a  miserable  monster  of 
success.  Not  that  Levinsky  is  an  abstraction,  or 
that  the  novelist  is  forcing  a  thesis.  Far  from 
it.  The  personality  of  Levinsky  is  as  sharply 
individualized  as  the  hero  of  Meredith's  "One 
of  Our  Conquerors,"  though  with  a  different 
kind  of  subtlety,  the  subtlety  not  of  detached 

229 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

analysis,  but  of  naively  simple  self-revelation, 
which  of  course  is  not  so  simple  as  it  sounds. 

Mr.  Cahan  knows  how  to  think  through  his 
characters,  by  letting  them  do  the  thinking,  as 
if  it  were  their  affair  and  not  his.  At  the  same 
time  he  does  not  perform  (nor  does  any  other 
artist)  that  foolish  and  meaningless  operation, 
as  expressed  by  a  great  poet  through  a  young 
critic,  of  holding  *'the  mirror  up  to  nature." 
Nature  in  a  mirror  is  just  nature,  not  nature 
thought  out,  excogitated,  turned  to  human  uses, 
interpreted  in  human  words.  And  this  is  the 
place  to  say  that  Mr.  Cahan  knows  how  to  use 
words.  There  are  no  great  phrases  in  this  book. 
A  simple  and  (intellectually)  honest  business 
man  writing  his  autobiography  would  not  use 
a  great  phrase;  such  a  phrase  might  issue  from 
some  enviable  person  in  that  intellectual  life 
from  which  Levinsky  was  excluded.  But  there 
is  no  banal  or  inept  phrase.  Such  a  man  as  Mr. 
Cahan  intends  Levinsky  to  be,  a  man  trained 
in  the  Talmud,  which  means  verbal  sense,  and 
hammered  by  the  facts  of  life,  which  means  a 
sense  of  reality,  and  a  wistful  failure,  which 
means  imaginative  retrospection,  says  things  in 
a  direct,  firm,  accurate  style. 

There  is  no  lack  of  emotion;  strong  feeling, 
expressed  or  implied,  runs  through  the  book 
from  beginning  to  end.   But  there  is  a  complete 

230  . 


ABRAHAM  CAHAN 

absence  of  eloquence,  a  deliberate  refraining 
from  emphasis,  an  even  manner  of  setting  forth 
ideas  and  events  impartially  for  the  value  in- 
herent in  them,  an  admirable  method,  the 
method  of  a  philosophic  artist.  Here  is  life,  some 
of  it  is  good,  some  of  it  is  bad;  it  is  all  some- 
what pitiable,  to  be  laughed  at  rather  than  cried 
over;  nobody  is  deserving  of  indignant  blame 
or  abuse.  It  is  our  business  to  understand  it  as 
well  as  we  can;  and  though  we  never  can  see  it 
in  its  entirety  or  with  complete  clearness,  if  we 
make  an  honest  effort  to  record  events  and  de- 
lineate personalities,  the  events  will  arrange 
themselves  in  a  more  or  less  intelligible  se- 
quence, and  the  personalities  will  be  their  own 
commentary  upon  themselves.  An  obvious 
method,  but  you  will  read  many  a  book  to  find 
one  skilful  application  of  it. 

It  seems  to  me  the  method  most  often  em- 
ployed and  carried  to  the  highest  degree  of  per- 
fection by  the  great  Russians.  I  am  driven  to  the 
timidity  of  "seems"  because  we  do  much  talk- 
ing about  Russian  novels  without  having  read 
many  of  them  or  understanding  what  we  have 
read.  But  better-informed  critics  than  I  have 
noted  that  one  characteristic  of  the  Russian  novel 
is  a  benevolent  impartiality  in  its  treatment 
of  all  kinds  of  people  and  a  calm  contempla- 
tion of  events  horrible,  gay,  sad,  comic.    A  rev- 

231 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

olutionist  can  portray,  in  fiction,  a  commission- 
er of  police,  whom  in  real  life  he  would  be 
willing  to  kill,  with  a  fairness  that  is  more  than 
fair,  with  a  combination  of  Olympian  serenity 
and  human  sympathy.  He  can  be  a  virulent 
propagandist  when  he  is  writing  pamphlets, 
and  when  he  writes  fiction  he  can  forget  his 
propaganda  or  subdue  it  to  art,  that  is,  to  a  bal- 
anced sense  of  life. 

When  I  say  that  Mr.  Cahan's  novel  sounds 
like  a  good  translation  of  a  Russian  novel,  and 
that  he  is  a  disciple  of  the  Russian  novelists,  I 
accuse  him  of  the  crime  of  being  an  artist  and 
a  seer.  As  a  matter  of  biography,  he  is  a  child 
of  Russian  literature.  And  that  is  why  his  novel, 
written  in  faultless  English,  is  a  singular  and 
solitary  performance  in  American  fiction.  If 
that  strange  demand  for  "the"  or  "a  great 
American  novel,"  a  demand  which  is  at  once 
foolish  and  the  expression  of  a  justifiably  proud 
feeling  that  a  big  country  ought  to  have  big 
books,  is  to  be  satisfied,  perhaps  we  shall  have 
to  ask  an  East  Side  Jew  to  write  it  for  us.  That 
would  be  an  interesting  phenomenon  for  some 
future  Professor  Wendell  to  deal  with  in  a  His- 
tory of  American  Literature.  And  by  the  way, 
Mr.  Cahan  is  a  competent  critic.  I  hope  he  will 
give  us  not  only  more  novels,  but  a  study  of  Rus- 
sian literature    for   the    enlightenment   of    the 

232 


ABRAHAM  CAHAN 

American  mind.  I  remember  with  gratitude 
an  article  of  his  which  I  read  when  I  was  even 
more  ignorant  than  I  am  now,  on  the  modern 
successors  to  the  group  of  Titans,  Turgenev, 
Tolstoy,  Dostoevsky.  He  put  Maxim  Gorky  in 
his  place  and  told  us  (this  was  before  the  Rus- 
sian invasion)  about  Andreyev  and  Chekhov. 
If  Mr.  Cahan  will  write  a  book  on  Russian  lit- 
erature, I  will  do  my  best  to  establish  bin*  in  his 
merited  place  in  American  literature. 


233 


JHOMAS  HARDY 


THOMAS  HARDY. 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  says,  apropos  Samuel 
Butler,  that  the  English  people  do  not  deserve  to 
have  a  genius.  Butler  himself  in  a  note  remarks 
that  America,  even  America,  v^ill  probably  have 
men  of  genius,  has  indeed,  already  had  one, 
Walt  Whitman,  but  that  he  cannot  imagine  any 
country  where  a  genius  would  have  more  un- 
fortunate surroundings  than  in  America.  Mr. 
Arnold  Bennett  sends  a  shot  from  the  same  gun 
in  "Milestones,"  when  he  makes  the  millionaire 
shipbuilder  puff  his  chest  and  say  that  there 
is  no  greater  honor  to  English  character  than 
the  way  we  treat  our  geniuses.  Egad!  The  un- 
worthiness  of  the  British  and  American  nations 
to  have  artists  born  to  them  was  never  more 
shamefully  manifested  than  by  the  reception  ac- 
corded thirty  years  ago  to  Hardy's  "Jude,  the 
Obscure."  Harper's  Magazine,  which  seems  to 
have  begun  printing  the  story  before  the  editors 
had  seen  the  complete  manuscript,  fell  into  tem- 
porary disfavor  with  some  outraged  readers. 
One  British  journal  distinguished  itself  by  re- 
viewing the  book  under  the  caption,  "Jude,  the 
Obscene." 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

It  is  inconceivable  that  any  nation  on  the  con- 
tinent of  Europe  could,  through  its  critics  or 
through  any  considerable  number  of  readers,  so 
dishonor  a  masterpiece.  For  "Jude"  is  a  master- 
piece; if  it  is  not  Hardy's  greatest  novel,  it  is  one 
of  his  three  or  four  greatest,  and  that  means  one 
of  a  score  of  supreme  works  of  prose  fiction 
in  the  language.  If  profundity  of  substance  and 
skill  in  narrative  are  both  considered.  Hardy  is 
without  rival  among  British  novelists.  His  is 
the  crowning  achievement  in  the  century  of  fic- 
tion that  began  with  Jane  Austen  and,  happily, 
has  not  yet  terminated  with  Joseph  Conrad.  In 
his  hands  the  English  novel  assumed  a  form 
which,  perhaps  without  good  critical  reason, 
one  thinks  of  as  French.  Despite  the  racy  local- 
ism of  scene  and  character,  Hardy's  work  seems 
alien  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  temperament;  it  has 
less  in  common  with  the  spacious  days  of  great 
Victoria  than  with  a  younger  time,  whose  liv- 
ing masters,  Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Galsworthy, 
for  example,  have  taken  lessons  in  art  across  the 
channel. 

In  a  prefatory  note  to  "Desperate  Remedies," 
dated  February,  1896,  Hardy  lets  fall  a  casual 
phrase  which  indicates  that  he  and  others  had 
noted  his  kinship  to  the  French,  but  that  he  was 
not  disposed  to  acknowledge  it  fully.  He  seems 
to  say,  with  that  kind  of  modest  pride  which 

238      - 


THOMAS  HARDY 

distinguishes  him,  that  he  found  his  method  for 
himself,  played  the  game  alone.  "As  it  hap- 
pened," runs  the  note,  "that  certain  characteris- 
tics which  provoked  most  discussion  in  my  latest 
story  [*Jude'?]  were  present  in  this  my  first — 
published  in  1871,  when  there  was  no  French 
name  for  them — it  has  seemed  best  to  let  them 
stand  unaltered."  What  characteristics  does  he 
intend?  And  was  there  no  French  name  for 
them  in  1871?  Or  had  not  the  British  critics 
begun  to  use  the  French  name?  Are  these  char- 
acteristics his  candor,  his  logic,  his  classic  fin- 
ish of  phrase,  a  certain  cool  stateliness  of  man- 
ner, an  impersonal,  distant  way  of  treating  most 
tender  and  poignant  subjects,  a  lucid,  ironic 
view  of  life,  perfect  proportion,  large  intellec- 
tual pity  and  freedom  from  cant,  from  sentimen- 
tality? These  are  some  of  his  virtues  and  they 
are  the  virtues  of  several  modern  French 
novelists  and  some  of  the  Russian  pupils  of  the 
French. 

If  the  ill  reception  of  "Jude"  caused  Mr. 
Hardy  to  foreswear  fiction,  then  the  fools  have 
in  a  way  done  us  harm  by  cheating  us  of  two 
or  three  great  novels.  Yet  genius  takes  its  re- 
venge on  a  dull  world,  especially  if  it  is  pros- 
perous genius,  too  well  established  to  be  starved 
out  by  the  stupidity  of  an  inartistic  people.  If 
Hardy  had   been   encouraged   to   write   more 

239 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

novels  perhaps  we  should  not  have  had  "The 
Dynasts."  And  by  and  by  w^e  shall  discover 
what  a  loss  that  would  have  been.  It  is  the 
greatest  epic  that  we  have  been  privileged  to 
read  since  Tolstoy's  "War  and  Peace."  And  it 
is  the  best  long  poem  in  English  since  Morris's 
"The  Earthly  Paradise."  Though  it  is  cast  in 
scenes  and  acts  it  is  not  a  drama  except  in  a 
vast  untechnical  sense  of  the  word.  But  epic 
it  is,  creation  of  an  enormous  imagination 
which  sweeps  the  universe  and  manages  a  cos- 
mic panorama  as  commandingly  as  the]  same 
imagination  dominates  a  rural  kingdom  of 
farms  and  desolate  heaths.  If  "The  Dynasts" 
and  Hardy's  shorter  poems  lack  one  thing,  that 
one  thing  is  the  magical  and  haunting  line,  that 
concatenation  of  words  which  is  everlastingly 
beautiful  in  the  context  or  detached  from  it. 
Morris  knew  that  magic.  He  was  born  with 
it,  and  no  reader  of  Morris,  except  a  critic,  will 
be  deceived  by  his  own  denial  of  his  divinity 
when  he  said  in  his  honest,  off-hand  way,  sen- 
sible as  Anthony  Trollope,  that  inspiration  is 
nonsense  and  verse  is  easy  to  write. 

"The  Dynasts"  is  an  extraordinary  poem.  It 
is  not  French,  it  is  not  Greek,  it  is  not  like  any- 
thing else  in  English.  Hardy  has  discarded 
Christian  mythology.  He  is  not  childish 
enough  to  revert  to  the  Greek.     He  has  in- 

240 


THOMAS  HARDY 

vented  a  new  one.  His  celestial  machinery  is 
as  strange  an  apparition  in  the  heavens  as  the 
first  aeroplane.  His  hero,  Napoleon,  rises 
above  the  human  stature  by  which  the  realistic 
novelist  measures  man  and  becomes  not  only  a 
tool  of  destiny  but  a  demigod  who  seems  to 
understand  destiny  and  share  the  secrets  of  that 
impersonal  goddess.  Those  who  are  curious 
about  Hardy's  philosophy  (we  like  his  art;  his 
philosophy  may  lie  down  and  die  on  the  shelf 
with  the  other  philosophies)  will  find  the  clos- 
ing chorus  of  "The  Dynasts"  significant: 

But — a  stirring  thrills  the  air 
Like  to  sounds  of  joyance  there 
That  the  rages 
Of  the  ages 
Shall  be  cancelled,  and  deliverance  offered  from  the  darts  that 

were, 
Consciousness  the  Will  informing,  till  It  fashion  all  things  fair! 

Such  is  the  ultimate  word  of  this  artist  who 
so  keenly  loves  beauty,  yet,  like  some  neo-Puri- 
tan  and  latter-day  ascetic,  cannot  draw  a  lovely 
woman  without  reminding  you  that  the  skull 
under  the  cheeks  and  behind  the  passionate  eyes 
is  not  pretty  and  will  probably  endure  a  long 
time  under  ground.  Is  he  of  like  mind  with 
his  chorus  at  last,  and  does  he  believe  that  the 
Will  is  going  to  grow  intelligent  and  make  all 
things  fair? 

Perhaps  Hardy's  proneness  to  dwell  on  the 
241 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

skeletonic  grin  of  life  is  due  to  his  exceeding 
sensitiveness  to  beauty.  Like  Poe  and  other 
poets,  he  cannot  abide  the  ugliness  that  is  in  the 
world,  and  so  he  insists  on  The  Conqueror 
Worm,  as  a  man  cannot  refrain  from  thrusting 
his  tongue  into  the  sore  tooth.  Perhaps  Hardy 
is  a  reaction  against  the  saccharine  optimism  of 
his  contemporaries  and  of  those  just  before  his 
time.  They  falsified  life  in  their  fictions  by 
making  everything  come  out  nicely,  thank  you, 
on  the  last  page.  He  leans  over  backward  from 
that  kind  of  untruth  and  comes  dangerously 
near  to  being  as  false.  As  between  falsity  in 
one  direction  and  falsity  in  the  other,  there  is 
no  choice,  except  that  we  have  had  so  much  of 
the  sweet  kind  that  Hardy  is  refreshing.  He 
tends  to  restore  the  balance. 

Ask  any  man,  rich  man,  poor  man,  beggar 
man,  thief,  how  life  has  gone  with  him,  and,  if 
he  is  honest,  he  will  tell  you  that  life  did  not  go 
definitely  one  way  or  the  other.  Things  some- 
times came  out  well  and  sometimes  not.  Hardy 
is  biased  in  favor  of  the  things  that  do  not 
come  out  well.  "Life's  Little  Ironies"  is  a  good 
title,  but  it  is  a  title  that  implies  a  thesis,  an  at- 
titude from  which  humanity  is  surveyed.  The 
stories  are  perfection  and  they  sound  true. 
Hardy  is  a  logician  and  he  will  back  any  tale  of 
his  with  evidence,  even  the  first  story  in  *'Wes- 

242 


THOMAS  HARDY 

sex  Tales,"  in  the  preface  of  which  the  author- 
ity of  physicians  is  invoked.  But  when  you  take 
all  his  stories  together  you  find  nine  failures  out 
of  ten  human  careers,  and  life  has  a  better 
batting  average  than  that.  No  one  doubts  that 
the  "Fellowtownsmen"  got  into  such  horrid  con- 
fusion, that  things  happened  as  they  shouldn't, 
that  every  shot  at  happiness  was  a  miss.  And 
"The  Waiting  Supper"  is  so  convincing!  that 
you  cannot  escape.  But  the  two  stories  together, 
regarded  for  the  moment  not  as  the  excellent 
works  of  art  which  they  are,  but  as  a  view  of 
human  destiny,  weaken  each  other.  One  con- 
vinces you.  The  two  together  make  you  ask 
questions  about  the  author. 

In  "The  Waiting  Supper"  there  is  one  line 
that  is  as  great  a  pathetic  fallacy  as  the  more 
familiar  and  cheeryj  kind  which  represents 
nature  as  smiling  upon,  the  lovers.  Hardy's 
lovers  have  to  submit  to  this:  "Thus  the  sad 
autumn  afternoon  waned,  while  the  waterfall 
hissed  sarcastically  of  the  inevitableness  of  the 
unpleasant."  Did  you  ever  hear  a  waterfall 
like  that?  The  only  waterfalls  I  have  heard 
quote  Darwin  and  discuss  the  election  returns. 
I  know  that  the  happy  poet  is  a  liar  when  he 
says  that  the  nightingale  is  celebrating  my  love 
for  Mamie,  for  the  nightingale  is  concerned 
with  other  matters.     But  as  between  a  nightin- 

243 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

gale  who  is  sympathetic  with  my  emotions  and 
a  sarcastic  waterfall,  I  prefer  the  nightingale. 
And  I  do  not  like  either  in  realistic  fiction. 

Thomas  Hardy,  the  idol  of  the  younger 
realists  and  the  liberator  of  British  fiction  from 
the  Victorian  hoopskirt  and  the  happy  ending, 
is  not  a  realist.  He  is  a  great  romantic,  with 
a  taste  for  pretty  girls,  moonlight,  heroes  and 
dragoons.  He  is  incurably  superstitious.  He 
is  pained  by  many  modern  things,  especially  by 
modern  restorations  of  ancient  buildings.  He 
takes  Tess  to  the  Druidical  stones  on  Salisbury 
Plain  because  he  dearly  likes  that  kind  of 
moonlit!  antiquity.  His  pronominal  substitu- 
tion of  It  for  He  does  not  achieve  a  revolution 
in  theology.  He  manages  the  destinies  of 
human  folk  as  arbitrarily  as  any  maker  of  fic- 
tion that  ever  lived.  But  he  never  made  a  story 
in  which  he  did  not  convince  you  that  life  is 
overwhelmingly  interesting  and  that  nature, 
girls,  and  dragoons  are  beautiful  if  sad  things 
to  contemplate. 


244 


GEORGE  BORROW 


GEORGE  BORROW. 

Any  bookl  about  George  Borrow  is  worth" 
reading.  The  two  volumes  by  Dr.  Knapp  are 
forbiddingl}^  dense  with  documentary  minutiae, 
yet  it  is  a  pleasure  to  loaf  through  them  at  least 
once.  Borrow's  burly  personality  makes  itself 
felt  in  the  driest  philological  note  and  vitalizes 
the  pages  even  of  a  commonplace  critic,  as,  in- 
deed, it  vitalizes  many  flatly  ordinary  pages  in 
his  extraordinary  books.  Mr.  Clement  K. 
Shorter's  "George  Borrow  and  His  Circle"  is 
interesting  because  it  is  about  Borrow  and  not 
in  the  least  because  it  is  by  Mr.  Shorter.  Mr. 
Shorter's  declared  ambition  was  to  write  a  book 
that  should  appeal  not  to  "Borrovians,"  but  to 
"a  wider  public  which  knows  not  Borrow." 

Every  book  about  the  fighting  scholar,  every 
moderately  competent  article  about  him  must 
invite  new  immigrants  into  Borrow's  kingdom. 
But  Mr.  Shorter  is  not  an  introductory  critic, 
not  one  who  by  his  own  skill  and  charm  sum- 
mons strangers  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  a 
great  man.  He  is  an  inept  critic  who  thrives  by 
attaching  his  name  to  great  reputations.    Fancy 

247 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

a  man  of  any  trifling  literary  experience,  with 
the  least  enthusiasm  for  literature,  writing 
about  style  in  a)  style  like  this:  "Borrow,  in 
common  with  many  other  great  English 
authors  whose  work  will  live,  was  not  uniform- 
ly a  good:  stylist.  He  has  many  lamentable 
fallings  away  from  the  ideals  of  the  stylist.  But 
he  will,  by  virtue  of  a  wonderful  individuality, 
outlive  many  a  good  stylist."  It  is  a  sin  so  to 
"style"  in  a  chapter  about  Edward  FitzGerald, 
who  at  the  sound  of  such  sentences  would  have 
clapped  his  hands  to  his  ears. 

Borrow  describes  himself  in  that  pugnacious 
defence  of  Lavengro  which  forms  the  appen- 
dix to  "The  Romany  Rye."  "Though  he  may 
become  religious,  it  is  hardly  to  be  expected 
that  he  will  become  a  very  precise  and  strait- 
laced  person;  it  is  probable  that  he  will  retain, 
with  his  scholarship,  something  of  his  gypsy- 
ism,  his  predilection  for  the  hammer  and  tongs, 
and  perhaps  some  inclination  to  put  on  certain 
gloves,  not  white  kid,  with  any  friend  who  may 
be  inclined  for  a  little  old  English  diversion, 
and  a  readiness  to  take  la  glass  of  ale,  with 
plenty  of  malt  in  it,  and  as  little  hop  as  may 
well  be — ale  at  least  two  years  old — with  the 
aforesaid  friend — when  the  diversion  is  over." 

Is  not  that  an  irresistible  man?  Shouldn't 
you  think  that  there  would  have  been  among 

248 


GEORGE  BORROW 

his  contemporaries  two  or  three  hundred  thous- 
and good  sports,  rooters,  heelers,  literary  and 
non-literary  bookmakers  who  would  bet  on  him 
and  back  him  in  any  enterprise  in  which  his  ad- 
venturous spirit  elected  to  engage?  Yet  it  was 
not  so.  He  enjoyed  only  a  short  period  of  pop- 
ularity after  the  publication  of  "The  BibU  in 
Spain."  When  he  died  at  a  ripe  old  age  in 
1 88 1,  he  was  not  well  known.  During  his  life 
the  only  highly  distinguished  man  of  letters 
who  knew  and  appreciated  him  was  Fitz- 
Gerald,  the  exquisite  poet  and  critic — Fitz- 
Gerald,  whose  literary  habits  were  as  distant  as 
possible  from  Sorrow's,  whose  fine-edged 
rapier  seems  utterly  alien  to  Borrow's  short  arm 
jab  or  his  overhand  wallop.  FitzGerald  had  a 
curious  accuracy  in  spotting  what  was  worth 
while  in  his  time  and  in  dodging  certain  cele- 
brated things  that  other  people  thought  worth 
while,  and  there  is  nothing  inconsistent  in  his 
knowing  that  Borrow  wrote  good  English.  But 
looking  over  Borrow's  shoulder  at  his  contem- 
poraries, and  remembering  Borrow's  ungainly 
verses,  one  is  amused  to  find  that  the  only  real 
literary  man  facing  one  with  a  wink  in  his  eye 
is  FitzGerald.  The  others  have  their  backs 
turned. 

Consider   also    Borrow's    posthumous    fame. 
His  first  biographer  is  Dr.  Knapp,  an  Ameri- 

249 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

can  professor  of  philology.  And  the  modern 
critics  who  praise  him  are  not  open-air  men, 
but  bookish,  library  men,  whose  names  do  not 
suggest  the  robustly  adventurous,  Lionel  John- 
son, Mr.  Watts-Dunton,  Mr.  Birrell,  Mr.  Sec- 
combe.  '. 

Most  literary  critics  praise  him  in  terms  lau- 
datory enough  to  atone  for  the  sins  of  their 
professional  predecessors,  whom  Borrow  held 
up  to  ''show  the  creatures  wriggling,  blood  and 
foam  streaming  from  their  broken  jaws."  His 
four  important  books  are  published  in  Every- 
man's Library;  Mr.  Birrell  says  that  "we  are 
all  Borrovians  now";  within  twenty  years  have 
appeared  three  biographical  studies,  besides 
Mr.  Shorter's.  Yet  Dr.  Knapp's  fundamental 
biography  which  was  published  in  1898  is  out 
of  print;  that  mysterious  and  reprehensible  en- 
tity known  as  the  public  has  not  demanded  a 
new  edition.  It  is  all  consistent  with  the  Bor- 
rovian  inconsistency.  Borrow  was  proud  of  be- 
ing a  gentleman  and  a  scholar,  and  he  was  both 
in  all  true  senses  of  the  words;  but  he  hated 
gentility  and  wrote  a  hammer-and-tongs  chapter 
against  the  genteel;  no  revolutionist  despising 
the  "bourgeois"  ever  punched  their  smug  faces 
with  such  violent  verbal  fisticuffs. 

He  boasts  of  his  fondness  for  gypsies  and 
prize-fighters  and  quite  simply  asks,  "If  he  had 

250 


GEORGE  BORROW 

not  associated  with  prize-fighters,  how  could 
he  have  used  his  fists?"  However,  he  is  an  aris- 
tocrat and  has  no  sympathy  with  radical  weav- 
ers. Despite  his  hatred  of  cant,  some  sentences 
in  "The;  Bible  in  Spain"  have  a  missionary 
twang.  He  drifts  naturally  away  from  the 
Church  of  England,  yet  when  he  attacks  other 
ecclesiastical  institutions  he  holds  up  the 
Church  of  England  as  the  exemplar  of  re- 
ligious truth,  ^e  scorns  all  deviation  from 
fact,  yet  his  biographers  have  not  wholly  suc- 
ceeded in  separating  what  he  did  from  what  he 
invented. 

He  was  undoubtedly  a  polyglot,  he  made 
metrical  translations  from  thirty  languages, 
wrote  a  version  of  the  Gospel  of  St.  Luke  in 
Spanish  Gypsy  (the  first  book  ever  attempted 
in  any  Gypsy  dialect),  supervised  the  printing 
of  the  Bible  in  Manchu-Tartar,  made  transla- 
tions from  the  English  linto  Manchu-Tartar, 
Russian  and  Turkish  in  good  style,  as  any  of  us 
who  has  read  them  can  testify.  In  the  person 
of  Lavengro  he  lost  the  stalwart  Isopel  Berners 
because  he  insisted  on  giving  her  lessons  in  Ar- 
menian! For  all  that,  he  made  mistakes  and  so 
gave  the  scholars  evidence  that  he  was  no 
scholar.  He  was  not.  He  had  an  instinct  for 
language,  especially  for  that  language  which 
he  knew,  as  we  know  it,  probably  better  than 

251 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

he  knew  Manchu-Tartar.  In  his  English  nar- 
ratives we  can  follow  him  and  praise  him  or 
censure  him  without  violating  the  severe  rule 
which  he  laid  down:  "Critics,  when  they  re- 
view books,  ought  to  have  a  competent  knowl- 
edge of  the  subjects  which  those  books  discuss." 

The  four  books  of  Borrow  which  belong  to 
English  literature  are  "The  Bible  in  Spain," 
"Lavengro,"  "The  Romany  Rye"  and  "Wild 
Wales."  "The  Bible  in  Spain"  is  one  of  those 
books  that  grow  out  of  circumstances;  it  was  to 
a  large  extent  thought  out  and  phrased  on  the 
scene,  amid  the  adventures  which  it  narrates; 
later  it  was  cast  into  book  form.  It  grew  out  of 
experience,  but  an  artist  shaped  its  growth. 
Borrow  was  sent  by  the  Bible  Society  to  dis- 
tribute Spanish  versions  of  the  Bible.  He  en- 
countered the  opposition  of  allied  church  and 
government,  was  arrested,  put  in  prison  for 
three  weeks,  and  liberated  through  the  influ- 
ence of  British  officials. 

It  is  not,  however,  the  Bible  or  his  mission 
that  stimulates  Borrow's  imagination.  Cities 
and  people,  meetings  on  the  road,  scraps  of 
talk,  sometimes  rather  long  conversations,  mon- 
ologues by  Borrow,  the  mischances,  dangers 
and  excitements  of  a  country  at  once  wild  and 
anciently  civilized,  Borrow's  opinions  about 
languages,  characters,  landscapes  and  anything 

252 


GEORGE  BORROW 

else  under  the  Spanish  skies — ^such  is  the  sub- 
stance of  the  book;  and  the  substance  is  trans- 
mitted through  a  style  that  gives  little  heed 
to  elegance,  that  walks  along  like  a  healthy  man 
on  a  tramp.  The  most  eccentric  of  men,  full  of 
strange  languages  and  odd  ideas,  Borrow  writes 
English  as  naturally  as  he  drinks  English  ale. 
There  is  not  a  touch  of  eloquence,  not  a  great 
phrase;  his  descriptions  are  rather  literal 
records  of  what  was  in  front  of  him  and  how  he 
liked  it  than  "word-paintings."  The  dominant 
writers  of  his  time  were  super-eloquent.  Bor- 
row does  not  speak  their  language.  Perhaps 
that  is  why  he  did  not  rival  them  in  popular 
favor,  and  also  why  he  seems  to  us  so  refresh- 
ingly downright. 

Borrow,  like  his  master  Defoe,  has  the  art  of 
setting  all  things  forth  as  if  they  were  matters 
of  fact.  Even  when  his  characters  talk  of  un- 
usual matters,  nay,  especially  when  they  har- 
angue and  gossip  about  queer  things,  their  con- 
versation sounds  like  a  transcription  from  life 
and  not  like  invention. 

"Lavengro"  and  its  sequel,  "The  Romany 
Rye,"  are  properly  classified  in  Everyman's  Li- 
brary under  fiction,  and  "The  Bible  in  Spain" 
is  classified  as  "Travel  and  Topography."  In 
what  proportion  autobiography  and  fiction  are 
admixed  is  a  question  which  does  not  effect  the 

253 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

merits  of  the  books.  They  all  follow  about  the 
same  method,  and  so,  too,  does  "Wild  Wales." 
The  episodes  are  inconsequential,  and  the  loose- 
ness of  organization  not  only  permits  Borrow 
unlimited  latitude  of  subject,  but  strengthens 
the  Defoe-like  illusion  of  truth;  he  never  loses 
the  tone  of  the  veracious  chronicler  who  puts 
things  down  in  the  order  of  nature  and  not  ac- 
cording to  the  design  of  art.  Between  adven- 
tures and  more  or  less  pertinently  to  them.  Bor- 
row becomes  itinerant  schoolmaster  and  gives 
us  instruction  in  language,  philology,  compara- 
tive literature,  ethics  and  religion.  He  is  not 
a  pedant,  but  a  humanist:  "It  has  been  said,  I 
believe,  that  the  more  languages  a  man  speaks, 
the  more  a  man  he  is;  which  is  very  true,  pro- 
vided he  acquires  languages  as  a  medium  for 
becoming  acquainted  with  the  thoughts  and 
feelings  of  the  various  sections  into  which  the 
human  race  is  divided;  but  in  that  case  he 
should  rather  be  termed  a  philosopher  than  a 
philologist." 

Borrow  need  not  be  read  continuously;  if  he 
enters  upon  a  discourse  that  promises  not  to  in- 
terest you,  you  can  turn  the  pages  rapidly  until 
the  eye  strikes  something  more  attractive.  In 
his  wide  variety  is  something  for  everybody. 
The  conversations  with  the  old  apple  woman 
who  had  read  the  story  of  "Blessed  Mary  Flan- 

254 


GEORGE  BORROW 

ders";  the  chapters  on  pugilism;  the  talks  with 
tinkers  and  publicans;  the  old  man  who  knew 
Chinese  but  could  not  tell  time  by  the  clock; 
the  outrageous  attack  upon  Walter  Scott;  the 
theological  arguments  with  the  man  in  black 
— these  are  some  of  the  choice  fragments  of 
what  Borrow  was  pleased  to  call  a  *'dream." 
The  general  atmosphere  is  less  that  of  dream- 
land than  of  the  broad  highway  in  full  sun- 
light. Since  Borrow  died  the  cult  of  the  open 
air  has  increased,  and  to  that  as  much  as  to  any- 
thing is  due  the  revival  of  interest  in  him.  He 
is  a  great  person,  a  colossal  egotist  who  in  his 
journeyings  takes  up  the  whole  road.  It  is 
healthy  for  a  man  to  be  an  egotist — especially  if 
he  is  a  colossal  one. 


255 


SHELLEY 


SHELLEY. 

In  his  "Defence  of  Poetry"  Shelley  says  that 
the  imagination  is  the  moral  instrument.  To 
be  greatly  good  a  man  must  imagine  intensely 
and  comprehensively.  Poetry  serves  morality 
not  by  what  is  explicitly  teaches,  but  by  its 
power  to  awaken  and  enlarge  the  mind,  to  ren- 
der it  "the  receptacle  of  a  thousand  unappre- 
hended combinations  of  thought."  Since 
poetry  strengthens  the  imagination,  which  is 
the  organ  of  the  moral  nature  of  man,  "a  poet 
would  do  ill  to  embody  his  own  conceptions  of 
right  and  wrong,  which  are  usually  those  of  his 
time  and  place,  in  his  poetical  creations  which 
participate  in  neither."  A  remarkable,  book 
could  be  made  of  the  best  things  said  in  prose 
by  English  poets  about  poetry.  Perhaps  one 
book  would  not  hold  so  much.  A  narrower  yet 
great  and  imaginative  book  could  be  made  of 
what  Shelley  said  about  poetry  and  what  Eng- 
lish poets  have  said  about  him.  Such  a  book 
would  explain  and  exhibit  the  theory  of  poetry 
and  the  art  of  criticism.  The  very  good  edition 
of  Shelley  in  the  Regent  Library,  (edited  by 
Roger    Ingpen)    contains    some    brief    "Testi- 

259 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

monia"  which  invite  one  to  the  essays  from 
which  they  are  taken,  by  Browning,  Swin- 
burne, Francis  Thompson. 

It  is  significant  that  Mr.  Ingpen  has  not 
quoted  from  Arnold.  If  it  is  the  function  of 
poetry  to  expand  the  imagination  and  make  the 
mind  aware  of  a  thousand  unapprehended  com- 
binations of  thought,  how  did  it  happen  that 
Arnold,  a  genuine  poet,  missed  Shelley  utterly? 
Arnold  was  not  satisfied  with  his  essay  and  in- 
tended to  return  to  the  subject.  That  he  could 
do  a  better  thing  is  proved  by  his  essay  on  Keats, 
which,  after  he  has  done  with  his  droning, 
schoolmasterly  defence  of  Keats's  morals,  is  elo- 
quent, serene  and  restrainedly  emotional.  Shel- 
ley phrased  many  of  the  revolutionary  ideas  that 
were  current  in  his  time.  Arnold's  timid  school- 
bred  culture  was  impervious  to  any  sort  of  revo- 
lutionary idea.  Shelley's  ideas  did  not  impress 
him ;  he  thought  Shelley  a  wonderful  singer,  but 
a  singer  without  a  solid  body  of  thought.  Now, 
Shelley  was  the  most  full-minded  poet  of  his 
time.  He  knew  more  about  what  ought  to  be 
done  with  the  world  than  any  of  his  contem- 
poraries. That  he  failed  to  free  Ireland  and 
that  the  French  revolution  was  a  disaster  are  a 
reflection  on  other  people's  intelligence,  not  on 
his.  It  is  not  at  all  derogatory  to  a  man's  ideas 
that  for  centuries  and  centuries  after  him  the 

260 


SHELLEY 

world  fails  to  come  up  to  his  teachings.  If  an 
angel  is  ineffectual  that  is  not  the  angel's  fault. 
Indeed  a  too  readily  effectual  angel  would  be 
rather  a  journalist  than  a  seer. 

That  the  bulk  of  mankind  is  ages  behind  the 
best  of  its  poets  and  seers  might  possibly  be  ex- 
plained by  the  fact  that  the  bulk  of  mankind 
simply  has  not  met  their  thoughts.  But  how 
shall  one  explain  the  fact  that  artistic  children 
of  culture,  who  have  had  opportunity  to  read, 
who  respond  to  the  beauty  of  seers  and  poets, 
remain  at  the  tail  of  the  intellectual  procession, 
are  not  abreast  of  long  dead  poets  like  Shelley, 
and  let  the  leaders  of  their  own  day  sweep  past 
them  unapprehended,  unguessed?  The  thing 
that  makes  one  impatient  of  the  privilege  of  cul- 
ture is  that  many  of  those  who  have  enjoyed  it 
do  not  lead;  they  drag  mankind  back.  In 
"Winds  of  Doctrine,"  by  Mr.  George  Santayana, 
the  mind  of  the  present  age  is  likened  to  "a  phil- 
osopher at  sea  who,  to  make  himself  useful, 
should  blow  into  the  sail."  When  you  make  a 
generality  about  the  mind  of  today,  you  are  per- 
fectly safe,  for  nobody  can  dispute  you.  No- 
body knows  what  the  mind  of  today  is  doing.  It 
is  doing  so  many  things  that  no  one  of  us  can 
keep  track  of  it.  But  when  a  man  writes  him- 
self down  in  a  book,  you  can  tell  what  his  mind 
is  doing — in  that  book.    I  should  liken  Mr.  San- 

261 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

tayana  to  a  philosopher  who,  really  wanting  to 
sail,  had  forgot  to  cast  off  and  was  still  lashed 
to  the  dock  with  a  spanking  wind  blowing  out 
to  sea. 

It  is  no  wonder  that  Whitman,  revolutionary 
in  substance  and  form,  perplexes  the  genteel  and 
the  cloistered.  But  it  is  a  wonder  that  Shelley, 
whose  form  is  classic  and  whom  a  century  has 
transformed  from  demon  to  angel,  does  not  reach 
them.  A  striking  example  of  critical  and  phil- 
osophic blindness  is  Mr.  Santayana's  essay  on 
Shelley.  Mr.  Santayana  is  a  poet,  and  in  this 
essay  he  says  beautiful  poetic  things.  He  is  not 
stupid  as  Arnold  was,  for  once  in  his  life.  But 
he  misses  Shelley.  He  understands  what  Shel- 
ley was  related  to  before  Shelley,  for  example, 
Plato,  but  he  does  not  know  the  relation  of  Shel- 
ley to  his  time  or  to  the  world  since  Shelley. 
What  Mr.  Santayana  says  is  lucid  in  phrase  but 
quite  hopelessly  confused  in  thought.  He  says 
that  Shelley  was  "a  finished  child  of  nature,  not 
a  joint  product,  like  most  of  us,  of  nature,  his- 
tory and  society."  That  is  not  true  of  Shelley 
or  any  other  human  being  in  recorded  history. 
It  is  worse  biography  than  Dowden's,  and  it 
seems  that  so  old  a  critic  as  Taine  might  have 
saved  a  man  from  writing  such  nonsense  in  the 
year  1912.  Mr.  Santayana  says  that  "Shelley 
was  not  left  standing  aghast,  like  a  Philistine, 

262 


SHELLEY 

before  the  destruction  of  the  traditional  order." 
That  is  naive.  Of  course  Shelley  was  not  left 
standing  aghast;  he  was  trying  his  best  to  destroy 
the  traditional  order;  he  was  butting  his  beauti- 
ful head  against  it.  He  did  not  budge  the  tra- 
ditional order.  One  reason  is  that  most  people 
have  impoverished  imaginations,  that  the  world 
can't  do  what  Tolstoy  thought  would  save  it,  stop 
and  think  for  five  minutes.  Another  little  reason 
is  that  there  are  too  many  conservatives  like  Mr. 
Santayana  teaching  the  young  men  of  the  world. 
Yet  Mr.  Santayana  says  that  Shelley  was  "un- 
teachable" ! 

Shelley  believed  that  a  man  would  do  ill  to 
embody  his  own  conceptions  of  right  and  wrong 
in  his  poetry.  Yet  every  man,  poet  or  not,  who 
writes  at  all  and  is  not  a  hypocrite,  embodies  his 
conceptions  of  right  and  wrong  in  all  his  utter- 
ances. Shelley  was  intensely  personal  in  his 
poetry.  His  sky-larking,  star-sweeping  way  of 
expressing  himself  takes  us  out  of  range  of  his 
individual  opinions.  He  spoke  heart-near  things 
in  splendid  distances  and  tried  to  pull  the  far 
skies  down  into  sodden  British  hearts.  The  re- 
volt, the  defeated  revolt  of  his  own  times,  near 
to  him  as  the  news  of  the  daily  papers,  he  alleg- 
orized as  the  rebellion  of  a  mythological  Islam, 
and  he  flung  the  stars  reeling  through  Spen- 
serian stanzas.     No  essayist  has  risen  fully  to 

263 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Shelley's  poetic  stature  and  comprehended  him 
except  another  great  poet,  Francis  Thomp- 
son. Speaking  his  own  convictions,  as  every 
man,  poet,  critic,  or  even  an  academic  voice  of 
reason  must  and  should  speak  his  convictions, 
Thompson  begins  his  essay  by  pleading  for  a  re- 
union between  his  church  and  the  art  of  poetry. 
So  much  of  his  essay  seems  to  me  interesting  but 
not  closely  relevant  to  Shelley.  After  this  in- 
troduction Thompson  soars  into  the  greatest 
essay  that  has  ever  been  written  on  an  English 
poet  by  an  English  poet. 

Most  poets,  with  their  wonderful  ears,  of 
c  ourse  write  good  prose.  Francis  Thompson 
has  a  fine  essay  on  the  prose  of  poets.  Even 
Browning,  who  wrote  little  prose  except  the  ex- 
traordinary parenthetical  letters,  was  so  clarified 
by  Shelley  that  in  his  essay  he  discovered  a  fair- 
ly fluent  and  readable  style. 

Shelley  is  primarily  neither  philosopher  nor 
revolutionist,  but  lyric  poet.  Yet  to  treat  him 
only  as  a  lyric  poet  is  to  forget  his  great  drama, 
"The  Cenci,"  which  can  hold  up  its  head  un- 
diminishejd  beside  the  Elizabethans.  That 
idiotic  British  officialdom  does  not,  or  did  not 
at  last  accounts,  allow  its  performance  on  the 
regular  stage,  is  perhaps  only  one  more  proof  of 
how  little  impression  Shelley's  austere  anarchism 
made    on    practical    British    morality.     "The 

264 


SHELLEY 

Cenci"  is  austere;  for  Shelley,  it  is  athletically 
economical.  The  last  speech  of  Beatrice  is  an 
unexcelled  emotional  climax.  Yet  even  in  this 
play  we  find  that  "intensely  personal"  note  of 
Shelley;  it  speaks  all  his  heart  against  all  injus- 
tice. The  play  learned  many  lessons  from  the 
Elizabethans.  It  is  not  far  wrong  to  call  these 
lines  Shakespearean: 

My  wife  and  children  sleep; 
They  are  now  living  in  unmeaning  dreams; 
But  I  must  wake,  still  doubting  if  that  deed 
Be  just  which  was  most  necessary.    O, 
Thou  replenished  lamp !  whose  narrow  fire 
Is  shaken  by  the  wind  and  on  whose  edge 
Devouring  darkness  hovers ! 


265 


H.  G.  WELLS  AND  UTOPIA 


H.  G.  WELLS  AND  UTOPIA. 

Utopias  fall  into  two  classes,  the  local  and  the 
chronological.  That  is,  some  are  removed  from 
present  fact  by  geographical  transition  to  a 
country  apart  from  us  in  space,  a  magic  island, 
a  realm  undiscovered  until  the  romancer  found 
it  and  assumed  it  to  be  extant  in  the  romancer's 
year  of  grace;  others  are  sundered  from  present 
fact  by  being  thrown  forward  into  the  future 
or  backward  into  a  time  that  precedes  recorded 
history.  The  desirable  land  within  the  limits  of 
present  time  and  the  known  surficial  limits  of 
the  globe  is  obviously  not  convincing.  One  fears 
that  it  may  be  rediscovered  and  invaded  by  an 
imperial  fleet  or  an  inquisitive  scientific  expe- 
dition. Crusoe's  island  is  no  longer  remote. 
The  geographers  have  plotted  the  planet  and 
have  snared  every  conceivable  no-man's-land  in 
the  meshes  of  realistic  lines  of  latitude  and  lon- 
gitude. 

The  ideal  civilization  which  plays  ducks  and 
drakes,  not  with  space,  but  with  time,  is  safer. 
Nothing  can  dislodge  it  or  disprove  it  or  in  any 
wise  proceed  against  it — except  by  force  of  su- 
perior imagination.     For  nobody  knows  what 

269 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

may  happen  in  the  future.  That  is  why  all  the 
theological  heavens  are  sublimely  ramparted 
against  attack. 

Bellamy  placed  his  ideal  civilization  within 
the  impregnable  security  of  a  time  as  yet  un- 
born. His  conception  was  original  and  in  its 
way  was  more  realistic  than  the  timeless  abstrac- 
tion of  Plato  and  More,  and  the  Nowhere  from 
which  Morris  sent  news.  The  fundamental 
scheme  of  portraying  a  future  upon  this  earth 
was  so  fascinating  that  Bellamy's  book  enjoyed 
a  success  out  of  all  proportion  to  its  literary  skill 
or  its  sociological  insight.  He  had  a  first-rate 
plan,  but  with  what  unfanciful  and  rigidly  pre- 
cise lines  he  filled  it  in!  His  style  is  stiff  and 
his  future  is  ossified. 

Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  took  the  idea  of  describing 
an  imagined  tomorrow  and  made  of  it  a  stimu- 
lating romance.  In  saying  that  he  took  the  idea 
one  does  not  mean  to  imply  that  he  borrowed 
the  scheme  of  "Looking  Backward"  or  of  any 
other  book.  The  notion  of  criticizing  today  from 
the  height  of  a  postulated  tomorrow  was  prob- 
ably born  and  raised  before  Bellamy.  My 
bibliography  is  imperfect,  but  I  seem  to  re- 
member that  an  Assyrian  conceived  the  notion 
and  inscribed  his  reflections  on  a  ton  of  brick. 
The  important  thing  is  the  kind  of  future  a  man 
imagines  and  the  way  he  gets  there  and  the  jus- 

270 


H.  G.  WELLS  AND  UTOPIA 

tice  of  his  backlook  on  the  world  as  it  is.  Wells's 
"The  World  Set  Free"  is  the  most  vision-expand- 
ing book  of  its  kind — if  there  be  a  kind — that  I 
have  ever  quarrelled  with  and  been  delighted 
by.  It  justifies  the  last  word  of  its  title.  It  does 
not  cramp  the  growth  of  the  race  between  a  set 
of  rules.  It  spreads  the  lines  of  development  out 
at  a  generously  wide  angle.  It  bids  humanity 
spring  from  what  it  is.  It  makes  no  desperately 
impossible  demands  upon  our  common  nature. 
Indeed,  with  a  cunning  hidden  plea,  not  evident 
at  first  glance,  Mr.  Wells  draws  the  world 
council,  which  gathered  together  the  shattered 
nations  and  gave  them  the  first  good  government 
they  had  ever  known,  as  a  collection  of  ordinary 
men,  with  only  one  or  two  inspiring  geniuses. 
The  idea — a  very  important  idea — is  that  any  of 
us  duffers  could  do  it  if  we  had  to,  and  if  we 
were  only  jolted  out  of  a  few  little  private  in- 
terests and  superstitions. 

The  value  of  a  Utopia  is  not  so  much  the  de- 
scription of  a  desirable  and  convincingly  attain- 
able state  as  in  the  reflex  description  of  an  unde- 
sirable state — the  state  in  which  we  live.  To 
show  how  the  "new  civilization"  was  unham- 
pered by  political  intrigue  and  financial  consid- 
erations is  to  show  how  obstructive  is  the  present 
system  of  politics  and  ownership.  "Man  the 
warrior,  man  the  lawyer,  and  all  the  bickering 

271 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

aspects  of  life,  pass  into  obscurity;  the  grave 
dreamers,  man  the  curious  learner  and  man  the 
creative  artist,  come  forward  to  replace  these 
barbaric  aspects  of  existence  by  a  less  ignoble  ad- 
venture." In  "those"  times,  that  is  the  present 
seen  from  the  year  2000,  many  of  the  homes  w^ere 
entirely  "horrible,  uniform,  square,  squat,  ugly, 
hideously  proportioned,  uncomfortable,  dingy, 
and  in  some  respects  quite  filthy;  only  people  in 
complete  despair  of  anything  better  could  have 
lived  in  them."  In  "our"  time,  that  is  about  2000, 
the  last  stupid  capitalist  who  wanted  millions 
for  an  invention  he  had  stolen  was  laughed  out 
of  court.  People  do  not  struggle  to  get,  because 
they  do  not  run  the  risk  of  starvation  and  wage 
slavery;  they  produce  as  artists,  because  man 
likes  to  do  things  with  his  head  and  his  hands. 
In  our  times  we  understand  that  Bismarck,  to 
take  a  salient  example,  was  not  an  admirable 
man  but  a  gross  person,  and  that  the  age  that 
produced  him,  made  him  a  ruler,  and  paid  him 
respect,  was  a  dull,  stupefied,  vicious  age.  The 
time  when  people  were  taking  pills  for  all  kinds 
of  ailments,, were  being  killed  by  the  slow  pro- 
cess of  the  slum  or  the  swift  process  of  the  ill- 
managed  railroads,  is  past  the  imagination  of 
"our"  time  to  conceive. 

From  such  a  past  the  world  is  set  free.    The 
people  of  that  past  day  might  have  set  them- 

272 


H.  G.  WELLS  AND  UTOPIA 

selves  free,  but  they  were  too  stupid ;  the  work- 
men were  debased,  timid  and  without  imagina- 
tion, the  capitalists  had  to  be  intent  on  property 
and  dividends  lest  they  fall  to  the  unpropertied 
condition  of  workmen;  lawyers,  clergymen, 
popular  novelists  like  Mr.  Wells,  editors,  jour- 
nalists, and  other  professional  parasites  did  not 
dare  utter  even  such  vision  as  they  had,  or  did 
it  for  money  under  convenient  restrictions.  It 
was  an  unthinkably  rotten  period  in  the  history 
of  the  world.  Only  a  few  kickers  knew  how 
rotten  it  was,  or  had  courage  to  express  their 
sense  of  the  prevalent  putrescence. 

The  account  of  what  used  to  be  is  just  enough, 
and  the  account  of  what  "is"  does  not  strain  the 
intelligence  even  of  one  who  sees  things  from 
the  point  of  view  of  1914.  The  only  unconvinc-  ^ 
ing  part  of  Mr.  Wells's  history  is  that  which 
narrates  how  we  ceased  to  be  what  we  were  and 
became  what  we  are.  He  wipes  the  old  world 
out  with  an  atomic  bomb,  so  destructive  that  it 
annihilates  all  the  capitals  of  the  earth,  makes 
war  impossible  and  compels  mankind  to  fed- 
erate. Mr.  Wells  has  a  penchant  for  "fishy" 
science.  He  knows  a  good  deal  about  chemistry, 
biology,  mechanics,  and  he  knows  that  novel 
readers  know  less,  as  a  rule,  than  he  knows.  So 
with  the  finest  air  of  conviction  he  shatters  the 
world  with  a  new  explosive,  which  has  a  kind 

273 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

of  laboratory-veracity  not  claimed  for  the  comet 
whose  tail  brushed  us  to  revolution  in  an  earlier 
of  his  engaging  romances.  The  clever  man  se- 
cures plausibility  by  rather  cheekily  dedicating 
the  book  to  "Frederick  Soddy's  interpretation  of 
radium,"  to  which  this  story  "owes  long  pas- 
sages." Neat,  isn't  it?  It  inspires  in  the  ignor- 
ant reader  a  confidence  that  those  atomic  bombs 
are  approved  by  the  most  advanced  science — 
though,  of  course,  Mr.  Wells  does  not  say  so. 
The  cataclysmic  revolution  is  splendidly  nar- 
rated, and  is  even  better  than  Mr.  Wells's  earlier 
mechanical  and  astronomical  romances.  The 
trouble  with  it  is  that  it  is  not  a  fitting  transition 
from  a  state  of  society  which  is  seriously  con- 
ceived to  a  better  state  of  society  which  is  de- 
scribed with  all  the  earnestness  of  a  sociologist. 
The  two  things  are  discordant.  If  we  are  to  be 
taken  from  one  civilization  to  another  we  must 
move  along  a  social  highway.  The  atomic  bombs 
are  out  of  key  with  the  prelude  and  the  last  two 
chapters. 

Mr.  Wells  is  fond  of  mixing  fake  chemistry 
and  social  reality.  He  has  succeeded  in  two 
kinds  of  fiction,  which  he  should  keep  distinct, 
the  Jules  Verne  romance  and  the  novel  of  pres- 
ent-day life.  He  persists  in  putting  the  two  in 
the  same  book,  and  they  simply  will  not  blend 
even  under  his  skilful  stirring-spoon.    In  "Tono- 

274 


H.  G.  WELLS  AND  UTOPIA 

Bungay"  he  gave  us  a  good  picture  of  a  quack 
millionaire,  full  of  the  spirit  of  the  living  age. 
It  was  set  in  a  realistic  scene  and  was  true  to 
life.  Then  for  no  reason  at  all  he  sent  his  hero 
in  search  of  a  mysterious  metal  called  "quap^" 
which  does  not  exist  and  so  never  burnt  the  bot- 
tom out  of  the  ship.  "Quap"  destroys  the  illu- 
sion of  the  book.  About  the  time  that  quap 
begins  to  do  its  work,  the  book  ceases  to  be  a 
novel.  "Marriage"  almost  ceases  to  be  a  novel 
when  the  couple  go  to  Labrador.  The  introduc- 
tion of  love  business  into  the  comet  story  is  an 
impertinence,  as  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has  com- 
plained. Mr.  Wells's  incurable  taste  for  roman- 
tic adventure  on  a  plane  removed  from  life — 
usually  an  aeroplane  that  does  what  no  aero- 
plane has  done  yet — vitiates  his  realism;  and  his 
concessions  to  the  "love  interest"  do  not  help  his 
experiments  in  scientific  "futurism."  He  is  best 
when  he  keeps  separate  the  two  sides  of  his 
genius. 

On  the  other  hand,  his  extraordinary  skill  in 
feathering  social  truth  with  romance,  and  his 
equally  extraordinary  skill  in  making  a  monster 
of  romance  eat  real  hay  are  the  virtues  of  his 
vices.  His  tracts  read  like  novels,  and  his  novels 
often  carry  shrewdly  concealed  tracts.  He  is, 
next  to  Bernard  Shaw,  the  most  irritating  and 
the  most  widely  read   revolutionary  economist 

275 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

who  writes  our  language.  Like  Mr.  Shaw,  he  is 
a  rather  tame  revolutionist;  he  has  never  got  free 
from  the  middle-class,  emancipated  clerk  view 
of  life,  and  his  romantic  sense  sometimes  cor- 
rupts his  sense  of  social  fact  as  it  does  his  sense 
of  scientific  fact.  But  he  always  thinks  in  am- 
bush behind  his  most  trivial  narrative.  And 
when  he  comes  forth  avowedly  as  a  thinker  and 
theorist,  he  has  the  vivacity  of  phrase,  the 
sparkle  of  manner  which  serve  him  when  he  is 
making  fiction.  Moreover,  in  spite  of  his  in- 
tense modernity  and  his  contempt  for  ancient 
elegancies  and  traditional  beauties,  he  can  write 
fine,  rhythmic,  luminously  visual  prose;  like  all 
imaginative  men  who  deal  in  words,  he  is  a  bit 
of  a  poet.  His  account  of  "the  last  war"  has  in 
it  something  of  the  quality  of  the  epic:  *'Men 
rode  upon  the  whirlwind  that  night  and  slew 
and  fell  like  archangels.  The  sky  rained  heroes 
upon  the  astonished  earth.  Surely  the  last  fights 
of  mankind  were  the  best.  What  was  the  heavy 
pounding  of  Homeric  swordsmen,  what  was  the 
creaking  charge  of  chariots,  beside  this  swift 
rush,  this  crash,  this  giddy  triumph,  this  head- 
long swoop  to  death?" 


276 


JOHN  MASEFIELD 


JOHN  MASEFIELD. 

The  first  version  of  Mr.  Masefield's  'Tompey 
the  Great"  was  published  before  "The  Everlast- 
ing Mercy"  and  "The  Widow  of  the  Bye  Street," 
those  virile  narratives  that  made  us  wake  to  find 
him  famous.  "Pompey"  is  vigorous  and  dra- 
matic, yet  it  lacks  the  note  that  announces  a  new 
poet.  The  earlier  poems,  "Salt  Water  Ballads" 
are  good,  but  do  not  rise  above  the  chorus  of 
minor  lyrists.  The  short  stories  in  "A  Mainsail 
Haul"  do  not  distinguish  Masefield  from  a  score 
of  sturdy  spinners  of  sea  yarns.  It  was  "The 
Widow  in  the  Bye  Street"  that  told  us  that  a 
great  new  ship  was  in  port.  After  that  splendid 
arrival  came  "The  Daffodil  Fields"  and  "Dau- 
ber." Meanwhile  the  man  who  had  found,  if  not 
created,  a  form  of  poetry  so  individual  as  to  in- 
vite the  final  tribute  of  parody,  showed  himself 
in  "The  Tragedy  of  Nan,"  master  of  dramatic 
realism. 

It  is  likely  and  logical,  even  if  the  dates  do  not 
fall  into  line,  that  "Pompey"  is  the  work  of  a 
young  ambitious  literary  man  who  in  the  hour 
of  conceiving  the  work  had  not  yet  discovered 
his  course.  He  had  to  a  large  extent  discovered 
his  style  and  his  attitude  toward  life  and  the 

279 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

speech  of  men.  He  makes  the  Romans  talk  in 
a  sharp  bold  staccato,  which  is  good  English  and 
excellent  Masefield ;  as  for  its  Latinity,  well,  the 
Romans  are  dead  and  we  do  not  know  just  how 
they  talked.  Pompey  says:  "We  were  happy 
there,  that  year."  Cornelia  answers:  "Very 
happy.  And  that  day  the  doves  came,  picking 
the  spilled  grain.  And  at  night  there  was  a 
moon."  Pompey's  next  speech  is:  "All  the  quiet 
valley.  And  the  owls  were  calling.  Those  little 
grey  owls.    Make  eight  bells,  captain." 

It  is  a  question  whether  a  modern  dramatist 
is  not  misdirecting  his  genius  when  he  makes 
plays  of  Greek  or  Roman  legends  and  charac- 
ters. To  be  sure,  a  man  of  genius  is  not  to  be 
limited  in  his  subjects  or  his  style.  He  is  free  by 
virtue  of  his  genius.  He  may  make  an  Iliad  if 
it  pleases  him  to  try  it.  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  put 
a  new  wrinkle  in  the  stiffened  parchment  of 
Caesar's  biography.  Ibsen  at  the  age  of  43, 
after  he  had  hit  upon  his  "later"  manner,  that 
is  after  he  had  made  the  simple  discovery  that 
universal  tragedy  grins  in  the  small  houses  of 
small  people  in  small  Norwegian  towns,  pro- 
duced his  "Julian  the  Apostate."  Poets  of  all 
nations  during  the  last  three  hundred  years  have 
retold  Greek  and  Roman  stories  and  made  new 
poetry  of  them.  But  on  the  whole  the  Greeks  and 
Romans  handled  their  own  subjects,  their  own 

28O 


JOHN  MASEFIELD 

lives  and  legends  fairly  well.  The  task  of  the 
modern  is  to  render  our  times  or  to  interpret 
timeless  and  spaceless  subjects  from  our  point 
of  view.  The  widow  who  lived  in  the  bye  street 
and  the  painter  who  was  killed  at  sea  are  not  as 
important  persons  as  the  Hon.  Cneius  Pompeius 
Magnus,  but  Mr.  Masefield's  poems  about  living 
(or  recently  killed)  obscure  folk  are  more  im- 
portant than  his  drama  about  the  ancient  illus- 
trious dead. 

"Pompey"  is  a  good  play,  that  is,  it  is  good  to 
read ;  I  do  not  know  whether  it  has  been  acted. 
It  has  one  characteristic  of  Mr,  Masefield's 
other  work,  a  direct  incisive  speech,  poetry  of 
the  naked  fact,  the  brief  metaphor  which  might 
come  out  in  any  man's  talk  and  which  has  the 
"unliterary"  flavor  of  reality — a  cunningly  liter- 
ary mode  of  writing.  Mr.  Masefield  makes 
Pompey  say:  "Five  minutes  ago  I  had  Rome's 
future  in  my  hand.  She  was  wax  to  my  seal.  I 
was  going  to  free  her.  Now  is  the  time  to  free 
her.  You  can  tear  the  scales  and  the  chains  from 
her."  Did  the  Romans  talk  in  this  clipped 
hurried  fashion?  Probably  they  did  when  they 
l^ere  excited,  for  it  is  human  to  talk  in  short 
..  ntences;  even  Germans  do  it. 

The  business  of  the  dramatist  is  to  make  you 
believe,  with  an  arrested  compelled  attention,  in 
the  speech  and  action  of  persons  in  clearly  de- 

281 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

fined  circumstances.  It  makes  no  great  differ- 
ence whether  the  scene  is  in  a  Norwegian  house 
or  on  the  necromantic  island  of  Shakespeare's 
"Tempest."  Sometimes  it  seems  a  more  wonder- 
ful achievement  to  make  the  Norwegian  house 
interesting  because  it  is  so  terribly  like  the  one 
we  live  in.  Mr.  Masefield's  Nan  seems  to  me 
worth  ten  of  Mr.  Masefield's  Cornelias,  and  the 
peculiar  style  and  habit  of  thought  of  Mr.  Mase- 
field  seem  more  fitted  to  the  modern  subject. 
One  of  his  metrically  ingenious  stanzas,  with 
all  the  artifice  of  meter  and  rhyme,  is  nearer  to 
life  than  his  vivaciously  realistic  sentences  put 
into  the  mouth  of  a  Roman.  "Back  your  port 
oars.  Shove  off.  Give  way  together.  Go  on 
there.  Man  your  halliards.  Take  the  turns  off. 
Stretch  it  along.  Softly  now.  Stand  by."  Was 
such  the  dialect  of  Roman  sea  captains?  No- 
body knows.  All  that  I  argue  is  that  Mr.  Mase- 
field's punching  abruptness  is  more  wonderfully 
real,  more  effective  on  the  lips  of  modern  people 
whom  we  do  know. 

0  God,  O  God,  what  pretty  ways  she  had. 
He's  kissing  all  her  skin,  so  soft  and  white. 
She's  kissing  back.  I  think  I'm  going  mad. 
Like  rutting  rattens  in  the  apple  loft. 

She  held  that  light  she  carried  high  aloft 
Full  in  my  eyes  for  him  to  hit  me  by, 

1  had  the  light  all  dazzling  in  my  eye. 

Every  poet  is  limited  to  his  idiom,  and  though 
he     may    make    broad     differentiations,     may 


JOHN  MASEFIELD 

change  his  structural  form  from  sonnet  to 
ode,  from  ode  to  dramatic  scene,  may  adapt 
his  style  to  a  character  to  the  extent  of  making 
clown  and  king  unlike  in  their  turn  of  phrase, 
yet  when  he  is  earnestly  poetic  he  writes  his  own 
kind  of  poetry.  Mr.  Masefield  vocalizes  Mase- 
field  sentences  with  the  breath  of  Romans.  So 
Browning's  characters  all  have  the  Browning 
abundance  of  telescoped  metaphor.  Shakes- 
peare's English  kings  and  Italian  dukes  trumpet 
Elizabethan  blank  verse.  The  identity  of  flavor 
and  idiom  and  of  metaphor  between  Shakes- 
peare's English  characters  and  Roman  charac- 
ters and  Italian  characters  will  never  be  per- 
ceived by  the  male  and  female  Mrs.  Jamesons, 
who  write  essays  about  Shakespeare's  "charac- 
ters," but  cannot  hear  verse.  To  be  sure,  Shakes- 
peare and  all  other  great  dramatists  make  the 
persons  of  the  play  adapt  their  substance  to  the 
situation;  naturally  Othello  in  a  jealous  fit  does 
not  talk  about  having  lost  his  ducats  and  his 
daughter  or  order  a  cup  of  sack.  But  within  the 
specific  situation  and  the  rather  loose  limits  of 
character  Shakespeare  equips  his  person  with 
a  style  of  blank  verse  that  is  primarily  Eliza- 
bethan, secondarily  Shakespearean,  and  only  in  a 
tertiary  and  wholly  subordinate  sense  Caesarean 
or  Macbethean.  D'Annunzio  writes  magnificent 
D'Annunzio,  with  a  recognizable  fondness  for 

283 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

certain  words  and  sonorities,  no  matter  who  is 
alleged  to  be  talking.  A  poet  is  at  his  best  when 
his  singular  power  of  phrase  and  his  substance 
are  most  happily  fused. 

Masefield's  instrument  plays  best  upon  modern 
themes,  upon  the  tragedy  of  obscure  people  in 
English  fields  or  upon  the  seven  seas.  It  is  his 
distinction  to  have  taken  the  lives  of  the  humble 
and  to  have  involved  those  lives  in  the  revolution 
of  the  stars  and  the  expanses  of  sea.  He  has 
lifted  coarse  words  into  literature  (the  Eliza- 
bethans did  that,  too)  ;  he  has  related  the  large 
elements  to  little  elemental  lives;  he  has  elevated 
obvious  simplicities  to  grand  complexities. 

The  resemblance  between  the  austerely  tender 
pathos  of  "The  Dafifodil  Fields"  and  Words- 
worth's "Michael"  is  a  genuine  resemblance 
honorable  to  the  younger  poet;  and  the  pointing 
to  the  resemblance  is  not,  I  trust,  an  example  of 
the  critic's  weak  habit  of  referring  one  poet  back 
to  another.  Mr.  Quiller-Couch  has  said  that 
"neither  in  the  telling  did,  or  could,  'Enoch 
Arden'  come  near  the  artistic  truth  of  'The  Daf- 
fodil Fields'."  Now,  if  one  is  to  compare  poets, 
for  the  sake  of  praising  them  or  for  the  better 
understanding  of  them,  it  is  well  to  make  com- 
parisons that  refer  the  new  and  unknown  to  the 
known  in  illuminating  conjunction.  To  say  that 
"Enoch  Arden"  does  not  approach  the  artistic 

284 


JOHN  MASEFIELD 

truth  of  "The  Daffodil  Fields"  is  to  make  an 
inept  comparison,  to  associate  the  weak  with  the 
strong,  even  though  the  comparison  is  negative. 
"Enoch  Arden"  is  the  flimsiest  kind  of  romantic 
fraud  in  Tennyson's  worst  manner.  It  is  a  sob 
poem  that  sends  only  the  tiniest  lace  handker- 
chiefs to  the  laundry.  "The  Daffodil  Fields," 
for  all  its  conscious  artistry  and  the  adroit  man- 
ipulation of  the  verses,  is  terrifically  sincere.  If 
its  substance  has  any  allegiance  to  another  Eng- 
lish poet,  we  must  look  for  a  poet  who  had  a 
realistic  sense  of  the  furrowed  field  and  a  vision- 
ary sense  of  the  stars,  that  is  Wordsworth.  And 
if  one's  odious  liking  for  comparison  is  not  satis- 
fied with  that,  one  may  ask  readers  of  poetry 
to  compare  the  opening  stanza  of  "The  Widow 
in  the  Bye  Street"  with  Chaucer,  and  think  of 
such  merits  as  plainness  of  phrase,  simplicity 
and  ease  of  narrative,  and  soundness  of  verse 
structure. 

Down  Bye  street,  in  a  little  Shropshire  town, 
There  lived  a  widow  with  her  only  son : 
She  had  no  wealth  nor  title  to  renown, 
Nor  any  joyous  hours,  never  one. 

Is  there  not  here  a  note  that  suggests  the  open- 
ing of  "The  Nonne  Preestes  Tale,"  even  though 
the  story  which  follows  is  quite  unlike  Chau- 
cer's? Or  is  it  only  the  "widow"  that  makes 
me  associate  the  two?  At  any  rate  it  is  pleasant 
to  think  that  Mr.  Masefield  in  a  strong,  not  an 

28s 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

imitative  or  servile,  sense,  is  heir  to  the  oldest 
master  of  English  narrative  verse. 

Then  if  our  habit  of  judging  new  poets  by 
old  ones  still  dominates  us,  let  us  take  any  pas- 
sage describing  the  sea  in  "Dauber"  and  put  it 
beside  any  of  the  thousand  years  of  English  sea 
poetry. 

Denser  it  grew,  until  the  ship  was  lost. 
The  elemental  hid  her :  she  was  merged 
In  mufflings  of  dark  death,  like  a  man's  ghost. 
New  to  the  change  of  death,  yet  hither  urged. 

Then   from  the  hidden  waters   something  surged 

Mournful,   despairing,  great,   greater  than   speech, 
A  noise  like  one  slow  wave  on  a  still  beach. 

After  that,  if  only  for  the  pleasure  of  quoting 
them,  recall  Swinburne's  lines: 

Where   beyond   the   extreme   sea-wall   and    between   the   remote 

sea-gates, 
Waste   water   washes,    and    tall    ships    founder,   and   deep    death 

waits. 

The  wonder  of  our  English  tongue  is  never 
more  resounding  than  when  English  poets  echo 
the  tumult  of  the  sea.  Mr.  Masefield  is 
not  so  much  an  innovator  as  an  initiate  into  a 
great  poetic  tradition,  the  tradition  of  a  race  of 
sailors  and  chantey-makers  who  began  with  "The 
Seafarer"  or  long  before  that,  and  shall  not  end 
with  "Dauber."  The  sea  is  in  Masefield's  blood 
and  in  his  personal  experience.  Who  but  an 
English  poet  would  have  ended  "The  Tragedy 
of  Pompey  the  Great"  with  a  chantey  to  the 
tune  of  "Hanging  Johnny"? 

286 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES. 

In  his  sensible  little  book,  "Literary  Taste: 
How  to  Form  It,"  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett  says: 
"In  attending  a  university  extension  lecture  on 
the  sources  of  Shakespeare's  plots,  or  in  studying 
the  researches  of  George  Saintsbury  into  the 
origins  of  English  prosody,  or  in  weighing  the 
evidence  for  and  against  the  assertion  that  Rous- 
seau was  a  scoundrel,  one  is  apt  to  forget  what 
literature  really  is  and  is  for." 

Of  the  vast  library  of  scholarly  research,  the 
most  fatuous  section,  if  one  is  to  judge  from  the 
few  specimens  one  happens  to  have  seen,  is  that 
which  deals  with  the  most  important  division  of 
literature — poetry;  and  probably  the  poet  who 
has  suffered  the  most  voluminous  maltreatment 
from  two  centuries  of  English,  German  and 
American  scholarship  is  Shakespeare.  I  have 
been  going  in  an  idle  way  over  the  notes  in  "The 
Tragedie  of  Jvlivs  Caesar,"  edited  by  Horace 
Howard  Furness,  Jr.,  and  "The  Tragedie  of 
Cymbeline,"  edited  by  the  elder  Dr.  Furness. 
And  I  have  looked  into  other  volumes  of  this 
laborious  work,  "A  New  Varorium  Edition  of 
Shakespeare."    From  an  enormous  mass  of  com- 

289 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

mentary,  criticism,  word-worrying,  text-marring 
and  learned  guesswork,  the  editor  has  chosen 
what  seem  to  him  the  best  notes.  The  sanity  of 
his  introductions  and  the  good  sense  of  some  of 
his  own  notes  lead  one  to  suppose  that  he  has 
selected  with  discrimination  from  the  notes  of 
others.  His  work  is  a  model  of  patience,  indus- 
try and  judgment.  He  plays  well  in  this  game 
of  scholarship.  But  what  is  the  game  worth? 
What  is  the  result? 

Here  is  a  volume  of  nearly  500  large  pages 
containing  only  one  play!  The  text  is  a  literal 
reprint  of  the  first  folio,  or  whatever  is  supposed 
to  be  the  earliest  printed  version.  The  clear 
stream  of  poetry  runs  along  the  tops  of  the  pages. 
Under  that  is  a  deposit  of  textual  emendations 
full  of  clam-shells  and  lost  anchors  and  tin  cans. 
Under  that  is  a  mud  bottom  two  centuries  deep. 
It  consists  of  (a)  what  scholars  said  Shakes- 
peare said;  (b)  what  scholars  said  Shakespeare 
meant;  (c)  what  scholars  said  about  what  other 
scholars  said;  (d)  what  scholars  said  about  the 
morality  and  character  of  the  personages,  as  (i) 
they  are  in  Shakespeare's  play,  and  as  (2)  they 
are  in  other  historical  and  fictitious  writings; 
(e)  what  scholars  said  about  how  other  people 
used  the  words  that  Shakespeare  used;  (f)  what 
scholars  said  could  be  done  to  Shakespeare's  text 
to  make  him  a  better  poet.    I  have  not  read  a]I 

290 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

these  notes  and  I  never  shall  read  them.  Life 
is  too  short  and  too  interesting. 

All  the  time  that  I  was  trying  to  read  the 
notes,  so  that  I  could  know  enough  about  them 
to  write  this  article,  my  mind  kept  swimming 
up  out  of  the  mud  into  that  clear  river  of  text. 
It  is  an  almost  perfectly  clear  river.  Some  of  the 
obscurities  that  scholars  say  are  there  are  simply 
not  obscure,  except  as  poetry  ought  to  have  a 
kind  of  obscurity  in  some  turbulent  passages. 
Many  of  the  obscurities  the  scholars  put  there 
in  their  innocence  and  stupidity,  and  those  ob- 
scurities you  can  eliminate  by  ignoring  them. 

The  really  valuable  note  is  the  etymological. 
Etymology  reveals  the  essential  metaphors  of 
words.  The  modern  reader  will  find  that  be- 
yond his  intellectual  front  door  stand  three  or 
four  wire  entanglements  of  connotation;  by  the 
time  a  word  gets  to  him  it  is  bruised  and  ragged. 
The  etymologist  clears  all  those  fences  for  you 
and  delivers  a  word  fresh  into  your  hands.  He 
shows  you  how  other  poets  have  used  it.  He 
enriches  it  with  other  connotations.  He  shows 
it  to  be  even  wealthier  than  it  was  in  the  mind 
of  the  man  who  wrote  the  Shakespearian  line. 
One  of  the  most  exciting  and  poetic  books  is  the 
Oxford  Dictionary.  The  dated  illustrative  his- 
tory of  a  word,  past  milestone  after  milestone  of 
use,  is  an  intellectual  epic    The  word  is  root- 

291 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

deep  and  branch-high  with  poetry,  with  the  im- 
aginative habits  of  the  race.  The  etymological 
note  not  only  clarifies  Shakespeare,  but  spreads 
behind  him  (and  other  poets)  a  sort  of  verbal- 
cosmic  background.  Etymology  brightens  the 
color  of  words,  deepens  their  significance.  That 
the  etymologist  is  often  a  dufifer,  who,  in  the  very 
act  of  resolving  a  word  into  new  chords,  writes 
stiff  and  stodgy  prose,  is  a  perplexing  thing  in 
human  nature  and  a  very  perplexing  problem 
in  that  appalling  institution.  Scholarship. 

It  is  impossible  for  even  a  vivacious,  humorous 
man  like  Dr.  Furness,  an  enthusiastic  amateur 
in  love  with  his  task,  to  live  in  a  library  of 
Shakespearian  scholarship  and  not  be  infected 
by  its  diseases.  Dr.  Furness  knows,  for  example, 
precisely  when  "Cymbeline"  was  written. 
Shakespeare  was  forty-six  years  old.  Now, 
"Cymbeline"  is  a  foolish  play;  Dr.  Johnson  said 
so.  And  there  must  be  a  reason  for  Shakes- 
peare's deterioration,  for  Shakespeare,  unlike 
other  poets,  is  not  to  be  allowed  to  write  bad 
plays  and  bad  lines  without  a  satisfactory  explan- 
ation. He  did  not  explain  himself,  but  the 
scholars  come  to  his  rescue.  Dr.  Furness  fancies 
that,  though  forty-six  is  not  an  advanced  age, 
Shakespeare  was  tired,  and  disillusioned.  "There 
may  have  crept  into  Shakespeare's  study  of  im- 
agination a  certain  weariness  of  soul  in  contem- 

292 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

plating  in  review  the  vast  throng  of  his  dream 
children.  ...  A  sufficing  harvest  of  fame  is  his 
and  honest  wealth,  accompanied  by  honor,  love, 
obedience  and  troops  of  friends."  "I  can  most 
reverently  fancy  that  he  is  once  more  allured  by 
the  joy  of  creation  when  by  chance  there  falls 
in  his  way  the  old,  old  story  of  a  husband  con- 
vinced, through  villany,  of  his  wife's  infidelity." 
And  there  you  are.  Shakespeare  at  the  age  of 
forty-six  is  lured  by  the  restless  joy  of  creation 
into  writing  "Cymbeline,"  which  is  a  poor  play. 
It  is  not  up  to  the  mark  which  Shakespeare's 
previous  masterpieces  have  set.  There  is  some- 
thing a  little  wobbly  about  this  conjunction  of 
surmises.  But  the  scholar  is  never  at  a  loss.  He 
can  deliver  immortal  Will  from  his  own  errors, 
shield  him  from  the  consequences  of  being  at 
once  a  god  in  art  and  a  human  man,  prone  to 
literary  lapses  and  slovenly  work.  The  masque 
in  the  fifth  act  *'is  regarded  by  a  large  majority 
of  editors  and  critics  as  an  intrusive  insertion 
by  some  hand  not  Shakespeare's."  When  a  large 
majority  of  scholars  and  critics  regard  a  thing 
as  so,  it  is  so.  It  gets  into  the  books  that  you  have 
to  read  to  pass  college  examinations.  And  if 
you  say  that  many  of  the  scholars  and  critics 
whom  you  happen  to  have  read  or  listened  to 
are  chumps,  when  they  deal  with  Shakespeare 
or  any  other  poet,  you  are  a  lost  soul. 

293 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

Some  of  the  notes  of  the  various  commentators 
are  suggestive.  But  many  of  the  notes  are  sheer 
impertinences,  especially  those  that  attempt  to 
mend  the  lines. 

I  would  haue  left  it  on  the  Boord,  so  soone 
As  I  had  made  my  Meale;  and  parted 
With  Pray'rs  for  the  Prouider. 

There  is  nothing  the  matter  v^ith  that.  It 
sounds  all  right.  But  the  editors  have  to  fill  out 
the  short  second  line,  to  make  it  scan.  Dr.  Fur- 
ness  thinks,  justly,  that  the  line  needs  only  "a 
very  timid  pause  after  'Meale.'  "  Of  course, 
any  reader,  any  good  actor,  with  an  ear  on  the 
side  of  his  head,  reads  all  lines  with  pauses  timid 
or  bold  as  the  case  requires,  and  does  not  make 
a  fuss  about  it.  It  is  only  the  scholars  that  fuss, 
or  poets  like  Pope,  who  are  entirely  out  of  touch 
with  Shakespeare's  free  metrical  habits. 

It  is  almost  inconceivable  that  grown  men  with 
enough  interest  in  poetry  to  spend  their  whole 
lives  in  Shakespeare's  company  could  have 
daubed  him  with  such  muddy  nonsense  as  one 
finds  in  these  notes,  which  are  not  the  worst  of 
scholarly  comment  but  the  best,  selected  by  a 
discriminating  man.  What  a  colossal  sham  it 
all  is! — erected  not  by  charlatans  but  by  men 
working  in  good  faith  and  with  disinterested 
devotion  to  their  task. 

It  is  not  merely  the  ignorant  idler  and  the 
294 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

superficial  player  among  books  who  has  got  tired 
of  the  institution  of  Shakespeare  Improved: 
Fourteen  Thousand  Doctors  of  Philosophy  in 
Session  Day  and  Night,  Searching  for  a  Serum 
to  Prevent  Spinal  Meningitis  in  the  Lines  of 
Shakespeare.  Millions  Needed  to  Continue  This 
Humanitarian  Work:  Fifty  Thousand  Students 
Under  Instruction  in  the  Art  of  How  Not  to  Be 
Poets.  Against  this  amazing  institution  some  of 
the  more  independent  surgeons  have  protested. 
One  was  the  late  John  Churton  Collins,  a 
physician  who  discovered  that  the  Shakespearean 
metaphor  was  not  a  locally  British  infection  ris- 
ing from  the  Avon  river,  but  was  brought  by  the 
verbal  mosquito  from  Rome  and  Greece.  Col- 
lins had  a  vivid  and  audacious  mind  that  made 
him  one  of  the  most  readable  of  modern  Shakes- 
peareans,  and  he  had,  I  assume,  considerable 
learning.  He  says:  "Dozens  of  impertinent  em- 
endations have  been  introduced  into  Shakes- 
peare's text,  because  editors  have  not  been  aware 
that  the  custom  of  using  the  same  word  in  dif- 
ferent senses  in  one  line,  or  even  twice  in  con- 
tiguous lines,  was  deliberately  affected  by  the 
Elizabethan  poets."  Deliberately  affected?  Yes, 
and  it  came  natural  to  them  in  a  time  when  lan- 
guage was  a  little  looser  and  freer  than  it  is 
after  t  hree  centuries  of  increased  use  and 
hardened  definition  both  in  prose  and  poetry. 

295 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

One  trouble  with  much  Shakespearean  scholar- 
ship lies  in  the  assumption  that  everything  that 
left  Shakespeare's  hand  must  have  been  perfect. 
Why,  he  probably  used  words  carelessly  and  did 
all  kinds  of  tricks  with  them,  as  other  geniuses 
do.  Why  should  we  assume  that  he  always  wrote 
a  good  line?  Some  of  his  lines  are  bad,  and  it  is 
not  necessary  for  Dr.  Pumpernickell  to  knock 
out  a  couple  of  words  or  add  a  couple  just  to 
make  a  line  go  metrically.  These  scholars  have 
a  split  vision.  In  one  note  they  treat  Shake- 
speare like  a  god  who  could  not  go  wrong.  In 
the  next  note  they  treat  him  like  a  sophomore 
versifier  whose  lines  have  to  be  corrected.  Dr. 
Furness  says  that  the  earliest  known  text  of 
"Julius  Caesar" — that  of  the  First  Folio,  "is 
markedly  free  from  corruptions."  What  cor- 
ruptions? The  printers'  or  Shakespeare's?  Dr. 
Furness  lugs  in  that  tiresome  phantom,  a  play- 
house copy.  "Our  only  recourse  is  to  accept  the 
explanation  given  by  Resch,  viz.,  that  these 
words  between  Brutus  and  Messala  are  an  inter- 
polation from  a  MS.  addition  which  appeared 
first  in  a  playhouse  copy,  and  which,  by  mistake, 
became  incorporated  in  the  text."  Now,  is  not 
that  a  "soft,  downy,  pink-cheeked  peach  of  an 
idea"  (Jonson's  "Sejanus,"  act  IV.,  sc.  13,  i,  23. 
Potter's  edition:  Oshkosh,  Scholar  and  Sellum, 
1913)?     Resch  be  hanged!     What  playhouse, 

296 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

copy?  When?  Whose  mistake?  How  incor- 
porated? A  solid  page  and  two-thirds  of  a  page 
are  devoted  to  explaining  a  difficulty  which  does 
not  exist. 

This  is  the  true  history  of  the  passage  in  ques- 
tion. Shakespeare  and  Bacon  and  Raleigh  met 
in  the  Mermaid  Tavern  for  the  purpose  of  turn- 
ing out  a  few  yards  of  Elizabethan  blank  verse 
in  the  post-Tennysonian  style  of  Mr.  Alfred 
Noyes.  It  was  a  very  difficult  job  and  Will  of 
Stratford  got  roaring  full.  He  went  home  on 
foot  to  Stratford,  a  long  journey,  and  found 
Anne  with  another  pair  of  twins,  one  of  whom 
was  the  poet  Davenant.  This  was  very  disturb- 
ing to  Will.  He  did  not  know  until  after  his 
death  which  twin  was  Davenant.  He  was  then 
in  that  fateful  year,  1599- 1608,  writing  his  play, 
"Julius  Caesar,"  and  making  extensive  use  of 
Seutonius's  "The  Lives  of  the  Caesars"  (Dr. 
Furness  thinks  this  doubtful,  but  if  you  are  go- 
ing to  guess,  why  not  guess  good  and  plenty?). 
Anne  got  on  Will's  nerves  and  he  had  a  bad 
morning  head.  That  is  why  he  made  that  slight- 
ly confused  passage,  which  has  bothered  the 
scholars  ever  since. 

The  following  example  of  how  Shakespeare's 
biography  is  written  is  not  a  parody.  It  ap- 
pears in  the  New  York  Nation  of  November 

297 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

27,  1913,  page  513,  in  a  review  of  Arthur  S. 
Pier's  "Story  of  Harvard." 

"Every  good  story  has  a  prologue,  and  the 
story  of  Harvard  has  one  which  by  no  means 
should  be  left  out.  In  Stratford-on-Avon  stands 
the  'Old  House  in  the  High  Street,'  identified 
by  the  most  eminent  of  our  antiquaries,  the  late 
H.  F.  G.  Waters,  by  certain  documentary  evi- 
dence, as  the  early  home  of  Katharine  Rogers, 
mother  of  John  Harvard,  from  whom  proceeded 
the  little  inheritance  that  first  kindled  in  the 
western  hemisphere  the  torch  of  a  liberal  cul- 
ture. For  this  we  have  distinct  contemporaneous 
chapter  and  verse. 

"At  circumstantial  evidence  we  look  askance, 
but  without  pressing  the  matter  unduly  this  may 
be  said — that  the  families  of  Rogers  and  Shakes- 
peare lived  in  close  neighborhood  and  intimacy 
at  Stratford  during  the  reigns  of  Elizabeth  and 
James  I. ;  that  the  poet  knew  Katharine  Rogers 
well,  as,  on  the  other  hand,  he  knew  well  Robert 
Harvard,  at  length  her  husband,  in  his  shop  at 
Southwark,  in  London,  hard  by  the  Globe 
Theatre.  So  far  the  conjunction  would  seem  to 
be  inevitable. 

"Then  looms  up  a  possibility  amounting  per- 
haps to  a  likelihood,  that  no  other  than  Shakes- 
peare was  the  intermediary  who  brought  to- 
gether the  Londoner  and  the  fair,  well-dowercd 

298 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

maid  in  the  remote  midlands,  that  he  was  a 
familiar  guest  in  the  home  in  Southwark  which 
he  had  helped  to  establish,  and  that  he,  the  genial 
family  friend,  held  on  his  knee  the  little  John 
Harvard,  the  first-born  in  the  household. 

"Could  this  touch  of  their  foster-father  with 
the  most  illustrious  name  in  literature  be  fairly 
established  (and  who  can  say  after  the  feats  of 
Mr.  Waters  what  scraps  may  yet  be  found  in  the 
dust-heaps?).  Harvard  men  would  indeed  have 
a  tradition  to  prize." 

Why  not  get  down  to  brass  tacks?  We  do  not 
know  much  about  Shakespeare's  life.  We  do  not 
know  anything  about  his  manuscripts,  or  the 
playhouse  versions.  We  cannot  even  rely  on  the 
printed  date  of  a  quarto.  We  do  not  know 
whether  a  corrupt  line  was  corrupted  by  Shakes- 
peare or  the  printer  or  somebody  else.  Many 
emendations  consist  largely  in  a  kind  of  scholar- 
ly punning.  For  example:  Shakespeare  wrote 
a  line  that  every  scholar  remembers,  for  it  is  a 
causer  of  gray  hairs  and  a  prodigal  spender  of 
the  midnight  taper:  "The  blind  Rush  hath  pro- 
claimed his  Bowells  search."  Johnson  conjec- 
tures that  four  lines  have  been  omitted.  Steev. 
conj. :  For  "blind  rush,"  read  "mind  rush." 
That  is,  the  impetuousness  of  his  thought  makes 
one  aware  of  how  his  instinct  is  struggling  for 
the  solution  of  his  difficulties.     Malone  conj.: 

299 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

"Bowells  lurch."  Evidently  referring  to  the 
sea-sickness  of  Antony  after  the  battle  of  Actium. 
Craik  conj. :  "Rowell's  search,  meaning  that  his 
blind  rush,  that  is  headlong  rush,  is  caused  or 
indicated  by  the  speed  of  his  horse  into  which 
he  has  thrust  his  rowels."  Cf.  B.  Jonson, 
"Every  man  out  of  His  Humor";  "One  of  the 
rowels  catched  hold  of  the  ruffle  of  my  boot." 
Oechelhauser  (Einleitung,  p.  1185):  But  this 
must  refer  to  the  speed  of  the  intellect  going 
through  purely  idealistic  experiences.  There  is 
no  question  here  of  either  sea  or  land.  Macbeth 
has  not  been  near  the  sea  and  Henry  V.  has  not 
yet  set  sail  for  France.  As  for  horses,  it  is  now 
well  established  that  there  were  no  horses  in 
England;  otherwise  why  should  Richard  have 
cried,  "My  kingdom  for  a  horse"?  If  there  had 
been  horses,  one  could  surely  have  bought  one, 
especially  a  King,  for  80  marks,  the  then  ruling 
price  in  Schleswig-Holstein;  and  even  the  ecsta- 
sies of  expression  would  not  have  made  appro- 
priate the  offer  of  an  entire  kingdom. 

So  they  go  "conjing"  and  "conjing"  through 
desolate  miles  of  notes.  In  spite  of  the  fact  that 
now  and  again  a  genuine  bit  of  historic  informa- 
tion, a  light  of  interpretative  intuition  flashing 
from  a  scholar's  note,  does  vivify  and  elucidate 
a  puzzling  line,  or  a  line  that  you  might  pass 
over  in  an  oblivious  mood,  nevertheless,  is  it 

300 


■'^    JJAKBARA,   CALIFORNIA 


SHAKESPEARE  AND  THE  SCRIBES 

not  true  that  this  whole  institution  of  literary 
theology  is  a  stupid  superstition?  There  are 
plenty  of  unsolved  i problems  in  Shakespeare, 
fascinating  questions  of  biography  and  interpre- 
tation to  which  conjectural  answers  are  legiti- 
mate. But  for  illuminating  answers,  or  partial 
answers,  one  has  to  go  outside  orthodox  scholar- 
ship, to  Walter  Begley,  to  "The  Shakespeare 
Problem  Restated,"  by  George  C  Greenwood, 
to  "Shakespeare's  Mystery  Play:  A  Study  of 
The  Tempest"  by  Colin  Still,  and  to  other  her- 
etical inquirers  whom  the  pundits  dismiss  as 
cranks. 

The  scholars  do  not  confine  their  thick-headed 
learning  to  old  poets  whose  language  is  strange 
and  who  are  made  clearer  by  a  note  here  and 
there.  For  some  stranger  reason  scholars  are 
hired  to  edit  the  modern  poets  in  the  popu- 
lar series,  those  valuable  and  inexpensive  re- 
prints which  help  to  spread  poetry  over  the  face 
of  the  earth  and  make  it  accessible  to  increasing 
numbers  lof  readers.  I  pick  up  the  "Selected 
Poems  of  Christina  Rossetti,"  edited  with  intro- 
duction and  notes  by  Charles  Bell  Burke,  Ph.  D., 
professor  of  English  in  the  University  of  Tennes- 
see. The  volume  is  in  Macmillan's  Pocket  Clas- 
sics. I  come  upon  "A  Green  Cornfield,"  a 
lovely  lyric  that  must  have  made  Shelley  look 
down  with  interest  "from  the  abode  where  the 

301 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

eternal  are."  There  is  reference  to  a  note.  I 
turn  to  it  and  find  this:  "An  inverted  simile? 
Consult  Genung's  Working  Principles  of  Rhe- 
toric,' p  79,  2,  example."  I  will  not  consult 
Genung.  I  will  advise  all  the  pupils  in  my 
school  never  to  consult  Genung  while  they  are 
reading  poetry. 

I  commend  to  those  hard-working  young  men 
and  women  in  the  universities  who  are  now 
studying  under  editors  of  Shakespeare  to  fit 
themselves  to  be  editors  of  Shakespeare  these  sen- 
tences from  Mr.  Max  Eastman's  "Enjoyment  of 
Poetry":  "A  misfortune  incident  to  all  educa- 
tion is  the  fact  that  those  who  elect  to  be  teachers 
are  scholars.  They  esteem  knowledge  not  for 
its  use  in  attaining  other  values,  but  as  a  value 
in  itself;  and  hence  they  put  an  undue  empha- 
sis upon  what  is  formal  and  nice  about  it,  leav- 
ing out  what  is  less  pleasing  to  the  instinct  for 
classification  but  more  needful  to  the  art  of  life. 
This  misfortune  is  especially  heavy  in  the  study 
of  literature.  Indeed  the  very  rare  separation 
of  the  study  of  literature  from  that  of  the  sub- 
jects it  deals  with  suggests  the  barren  and 
formal  character  of  it.  As  usually  taught  for 
three  years  to  postgraduates  in  our  universities, 
it  is  not  worth  spending  three  weeks  upon." 


302 


GEORGE  MOORE  AND  OTHER  IRISH 
WRITERS 


GEORGE  MOORE  AND  OTHER  IRISH 
WRITERS. 

"Though  I  may  have  lost  the  habit  of  read- 
ing," says  Mr.  Moore,  "I  have  acquired,  per- 
haps more  than  any  other  human  being,  another 
habit,  the  habit  of  thinking.  I  love  my  own 
thoughts."  It  must  be  a  great  pleasure  to  be 
Mr.  George  Moore,  to  have  confidence  in  one's 
intellectual  habits,  to  enjoy  the  memories  and 
opinions  that  the  mind  excogitates,  and  to  be  able 
to  phrase  them  with  beautiful  precision.  The 
mind  that  honestly  likes  itself  is  sure  to  attract 
other  minds  and  to  interest  even  those  that  are 
antipathetic.  If  Mr.  Moore  does  not  persuade 
you  that  all  his  judgments  are  to  be  accepted,  he 
provokes  you  to  examine  your  own.  He  is  stim- 
ulant, irritant,  but  there  is  no  depressant  reaction 
from  him.  One  can  stand  a  large  dose  of  him, 
both  of  his  exquisite  fiction  and  of  his  repetitive 
reminiscences,  which  may  or  may  not  be  fiction. 

There  is  a  remark  ascribed  to  Lady  Gregory: 
"Some  men  kiss  and  do  not  tell ;  George  Moore 
does  not  kiss,  but  he  tells."  It  is  the  business 
of  the  writer  of  fiction  to  "tell,"  and  it  makes 
little  difference  to  the  reader  who  reads  for  fun 

305 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

whether  the  gallant  adventures  are  biographical 
or  not.  Early  in  his  literary  career  Mr.  Moore 
tried  the  confessional  form  of  narrative  and  suc- 
ceeded masterfully.  The  young  man  v^ho  "con- 
fessed" twenty-five  years  ago  grew  older,  and 
in  "Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life"  looked  back 
upon  his  youth  from  the  quiescence  of  middle 
age.  Mr.  Moore  says  that  "if  the  reader  of 
'Vale'  be  wishful  to  know  what  happened  at  Ore- 
lay  he  can  do  so  in  a  volume  entitled  'Memoirs 
of  My  Dead  Life,'  but  he  need  not  read  this 
novel  to  follow  adequately  the  story  of  'Vale.' " 
So  the  "Memoirs"  is  fiction.  What,  then,  is 
"Hail  and  Farewell"?  Simply  an  extension  of 
the  autobiographic  novel,  it  includes  real  per- 
sons living  and  dead  and  calls  them  by  their 
names,  but  it  is  as  obviously  a  "made-up"  book 
as  anything  in  literature.  It  is  the  work  of  an 
artist  and  critic,  the  artist  who  gave  us  two  mas- 
terpieces, "Esther  Waters"  and  "Evelyn  Innes," 
and  the  critic,  who,  apropos  books  and  pictures, 
writes,  if  not  with  infallible  judgment,  ever  with 
an  unfailing  sense  of  beauty. 

Mr.  Moore's  lady-loves  have  not,  according 
to  his  own  testimony,  direct  and  unconscious, 
been  the  most  interesting  affairs  of  his  life.  He 
writes  better  about  Manet  than  about  an  ama- 
tory encounter  of  yesteryear.  The  women  of  his 
"regular"  novels  are  more  vivid  than  the  women 

306 


GEO.  MOORE  AND  IRISH  WRITERS 

who  perturb  his  mature  reminiscences.  He  says 
that  the  critics  complain  that  ^'instead  of  creat- 
ing types  of  character  like  Esther  Waters,"  he 
is  wasting  his  time  describing  his  friends,  "mere 
portrait  painting,"  and  he  asks  an  argumentative 
question:  '^In  writing  'Esther  Waters'  did  I  not 
think  of  one  heroic  woman?" 

For  once  the  critics  are  on  the  right  side. 
Lady  Gregory  is  interesting  in  her  own  person 
and  her  own  work,  but  Mr.  Moore  can  never 
make  her  so  interesting  in  a  book  as  he  has  made 
Esther  and  Evelyn.  And  the  ladies  of  his  ex- 
perience are  more  alive  when  he  uses  them  as 
matter  for  fiction  than  when  he  sits  behind  a 
cigar  dictating  memories.  That  in  creating 
Esther  he  was  thinking  of  an  heroic  woman  is 
his  concern,  not  ours.  His  private  kisses  un- 
doubtedly taught  him  something  of  the  art  of 
making  fictitious  kisses  public;  they  furnished 
him,  as  such  experiences  furnish  every  author, 
with  the  story  which  as  an  artist  he  was  to  "tell." 
But  his  purely  personal  revelations  are  not  start- 
Inig.  Ladies  flit  into  his  memory,  receive  the 
mostidelicate  literary  treatment  and  flit  out  again. 
Nothing  unusual  happens  at  Orelay  or  anywhere 
else,  and  what  happens  is  handled  finely,  timidly 
even,  with  what  may  have  been  audacity  in  1890, 
but  no  longer  strikes  us  as  valiantly  candid.  The 
introduction  to  "Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life" 

307 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

now  seems  much  ado  over  little;  it  is  out  of  pro- 
portion and  is  a  wobbly  piece  of  thinking  such 
as  Mr.  Moore's  Irish  born  and  French  trained 
mind  is  seldom  guilty  of.  The  "Memoirs"  and 
"Hail  and  Farewell"  are  to  be  enjoyed  and 
admired.  Even  an  Irishman  ought  not  to  find 
in  them  occasion  for  more  than  a  contest  of  wit 

No  page  of  "Hail  and  Farewell"  is  flat;  no 
opinion  of  Mr.  Moore's  leaves  you  quite  indif- 
ferent. The  most  interesting  pages,  more  in- 
teresting than  his  portrait  of  himself  as  a  lover 
in  France  or  a  member  of  the  landed  gentry  of 
county  Mayo,  are  those  which  criticize  the  per- 
sonalities and  the  ideas  of  the  so-called  Celtic 
Revival.  His  comments  on  Lady  Gregory  and 
"Willie"  Yeats  just  miss  being  insults.  To  say 
that  "Lady  Gregory  has  never  been  for  me  a  very 
real  person"  is  gratuitous  and  not  quite  conson- 
ant with  that  honesty  which  Mr.  Moore  advo- 
cates and  for  the  most  part  practises.  For  in 
his  portrait  of  her  and  his  comments  on  her  he 
shows  that  she  is  a  very  real  person  to  him  and 
a  writer  who  compels  his  consideration.  In  the 
act  of  putting  a  pin  through  the  humbuggery  of 
others  he  buzzes  himself. 

However,  his  literary  criticism  of  their  work 
is  delightful.  Whether  it  is  true  or  not  we 
Yankees  have  no  sure  means  of  judging.  He 
says  that  Lady  Gregory's  style  which  Mr.  Yeats 

308 


GEO.  MOORE  AND  IRISH  WRITERS 

so  highly  values,  the  speech  that  she  learned  from 
the  people  and  puts  into  the  mouths  of  her  char- 
acters, "consists  of  no  more  than  a  dozen  turns  of 
speech,  dropped  into  pages  of  English  so  ordin- 
ary, that  redeemed  from  these  phrases  it  might 
appear  in  any  newspaper  without  attracting  at- 
tention." Well,  is  not  that  true  of  the  speech 
of  the  Irish  or  any  province  of  England  or 
America?  Our  dialectic  differences  are  few  but 
important.  The  speech  of  Lady  Gregory's 
characters  is  effective,  and  more  than  that,  the 
humor  and  the  pathos  of  them  is  deeper  than 
their  speech  or  any  peculiar  turns  of  phrase. 

Doubtless  (as  would  say  Sir  Sidney  Lee, 
whom  Mr.  Moore  despises),  doubtless  Mr. 
Yeats  makes  too  much  of  Lady  Gregory's  dis- 
covery of  dialect  and  of  his  own  discovery  of 
Lady  Gregory.  In  the  revised  version  of  "Red 
Hanrahan,"  he  thanks  Lady  Gregory  "who 
helped  me  to  rewrite  The  Stories  of  Red  Hanra- 
han in  the  beautiful  country  speech  of  Kiltartan, 
and  nearer  to  the  tradition  of  the  people  among 
whom  he,  or  some  likeness  of  him,  drihed  and  is 
remembered."  It  is  little  I  care,  myself  being 
a  literary  man,  whether  the  metaphors  and  the 
syntax  and  the  sentence  rhythms  were  contrived 
by  Mr.  Yeats  or  Lady  Gregory  or  the  people  of 
Kiltartan,  or  whether  they  are  natural  to  the 
English  tongue  of  other  times  and  other  regions 

309 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

of  the  world.  They  are  impressive,  they  convey 
the  story,  and  they  give  to  the  story  the  strange 
color  appropriate  to  it.  Mr.  Yeats  plays  with 
verbal  color,  with  lights  and  darkness  in  a  way 
that  should  appeal  to  so  sympathetic  a  student 
of  the  French  impressionists  as  Mr.  Moore. 

To  be  sure,  there  is  always  the  danger  of  af- 
fectation, and  the  concluding  sentences  of  Mr. 
Yeats's  dedicatory  letter  to  "AE"  are  pretty  close 
to  buncombe.  "Ireland,  which  is  still  predom- 
inantly Celtic,  has  preserved,  with  some  less  ex- 
cellent things,  a  gift  of  vision  which  has  died  out 
among  more  hurried  and  more  successful 
nations;  no  shining  candelabra  have  prevented 
us  from  looking  into  the  darkness,  and  when  one 
looks  into  the  darkness  there  is  always  something 
there."  Not  always ;  there  may  not  be  anything 
there  worth  talking  about,  not  even  a  black  cat. 
And  the  man  of  poetic  vision  may  be  a  citizen  of 
a  relatively  successful  nation.  The  eye  does  not 
thrive  in  the  dark,  but  is  gradually  atrophied. 
It  was  not  by  scrutinizing  the  dark,  but  by  using 
his  ear  and  his  wonderful  visual  imagination 
that  Mr.  Yeats  learned  to  write  the  verses  in 
"Red  Hanrahan's  Curse,"  verses  the  like  of 
which  no  other  man  can  write. 

In  such  verses  lives  and  will  live  the  real 
Yeats.  That  some  of  his  verses  are  obscure  and 
weak  does  not  matter.     Greater  poets  than  he 

310 


GEO.  MOORE  AND  IRISH  WRITERS 

have  failed  at  times.  And  the  best  of  his  later 
verse  is  his  very  best;  he  grows  and  keeps  young, 
for  he  has  been  dipped  in  some  magic  well. 
That  he  has  foibles  a  plenty  is  of  little  moment; 
greater  poets  than  he  have  allowed  the  fool  to 
triumph  over  the  genius  sometimes.  The  divine 
fool  is  one  of  the  common  themes  in  poetc 
legend.  Later  criticism  will  assess  the  value  of 
the  "school"  that  he  has  founded  and  appraise 
his  influence  in  the  literary  history  of  Ireland. 
The  function  of  criticism  at  the  present  time  is 
to  proclaim  the  lyric  poet  and  persuade  readers 
to  subject  themselves  to  the  enchantment  of  his 
songs.  It  is  surprising  that  Mr.  Moore,  who 
preaches  the  gospel  of  beauty  with  a  fervor 
worthy  of  Keats,  should  not  balance  his  witty 
strictures  with  a  little  more  hearty  appreciation. 
He  quotes  one  of  his  friends  as  saying  that  Yeats 
"took  his  colleen  to  London  and  put  paint  upon 
her  cheeks  and  dye  upon  her  hair  and  sent  her 
up  Piccadilly." 

And  another  critic  added  that  the  hat  and 
feathers  were  supplied  by  Arthur  Symons.  That 
is  funny  enough  and  serves  the  purpose  of  criti- 
cism by  arousing  interest.  It  also  gives  other 
critics  opportunity  to  remind  their  readers  that 
Yeats's  colleen,  whether  in  Sligo  or  London,  is 
a  lovely  witch. 

One  story  that  Mr.  Moore  tells  of  Mr.  Yeats 

3" 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

is  beyond  my  un-Celtic  sense  of  humor.  He  rep- 
resents Mr.  Yeats  as  coming  down  to  luncheon 
at  Lady  Gregory's  house  and  saying:  "I  have 
had  a  great  morning.  I  have  written  eight 
lines."  Where  is  the  joke?  It  does  not  seem 
to  be  at  the  expense  of  the  poet.  Eight  of  his 
lines  may  seem  a  poor  day's  work  to  so  great  a 
man  as  George  Moore.  But  some  of  us  who 
have  not  earned  the  right  to  be  patronizing 
would  cheerfully  devote  a  month  of  Sundays,  if 
we  knew  how,  to  making  one  line  as  good  as 
the  best  of  Yeats.  These  Irish  people  rag  each 
other  delightfully,  and  it  is  more  delightful  to 
poke  fun  than  to  admire  too  mutually;  perhaps 
it  is  more  Irish. 

Of  living  Irishmen  the  two  most  distinguished 
writers  of  prose  are  George  Moore  and  Ber- 
nard Shaw.  They  resemble  each  other  in  two 
or  three  particulars.  Both  are  out  of  sympathy 
with  the  modern  movement  in  Irish  literature, 
with  the  "Celtic  revival,"  with  all  that  revolves 
about  the  person  of  Mr.  Yeats.  In  the  intro- 
duction to  "John  Bull's  Other  Island,"  Mr. 
Shaw  says  (I  quote  from  memory)  that  he  is 
an  old-fashioned  Irishman  who  sees  other 
Irishmen  as  they  really  are  and  not  as  the  young 
people  of  the  Abbey  Theatre  imagine  them  to 
be.  Mr.  Moore  somewhat  grudgingly  concedes 
that  Synge  was  a  man  of  genius  and  that  Lady 

312 


GEO.  MOORE  AND  IRISH  WRITERS 

Gregory's  plays,  though  inferior  to  the  "Play- 
boy" are  all  meritorious.  But  he  implies,  if  he 
does  not  directly  say,  that  the  only  man  who 
really  understands  the  diction  of  the  Irish  is 
George  Moore,  Esq.,  of  Moore  Hall.  Another 
point  of  resemblance  between  Shaw  and  Moore 
is  that  both  insist  on  calling  themselves  shame- 
less; they  boast  their  independence  and  find  sat- 
isfaction in  contemplating  their  difference  from 
other  people.  It  is  amusing  to  think  that  the 
reading  world  has  long  taken  them  for  granted 
and  is  no  longer  shocked.  Both  are  masters  of 
the  English  tongue,  not  of  a  new  style  full  of 
strange  idioms,  natural  or  artificial,  but  of  the 
straightest  sort  of  classic  English,  firm  as  the  best 
prose  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

It  is  that  English  which  shall  save  these 
Celtic  iconoclasts  who  are  now  respectable  old 
gentlemen.  Irish  to  the  back-bone,  they  took 
for  foster  mother  the  finest  prose  of  the  race  that 
betrayed  their  country;  they  became  favorite 
sons  of  an  empire  superior  to  the  political  and 
racial  divisions  of  the  world.  Mr.  Moore  thinks 
that  the  English  are  a  tired  race  and  their  weari- 
ness betrays  itself  in  the  language.  "God  help 
the  writer  who  puts  pen  to  paper  in  fifty  years' 
time,  for  all  that  will  be  left  of  the  language 
will  be  a  dry  shank-bone  that  has  been  lying 
a  long  while  on  the  dust-heap  of  empire."    A 

313 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

dismal  prophecy  which  is  cheerfully  contra- 
dicted by  the  facts  of  literary  history.  The  politi- 
cal empire  may  be  disrupted,  Ireland  may  be 
freed  from  English  yoke  and  split  in  twain. 
But  the  language  is  safe.  Artists  like  Mr.  Moore 
preserve  its  integrity  and  renew  its  vitality.  And 
we  have  not  heard  the  last  of  James  Joyce  and 
James  Stephens,  or  of  one  or  two  young  men 
who  were  born  on  the  island  that  lies  east  of 
Dublin. 


3H 


JAMES  JOYCE 


JAMES  JOYCE. 

In  the  preface  of  "Pendennis"  Thackeray 
says:  "Since  the  author  of  'Tom  Jones'  was 
buried,  no  writer  of  fiction  among  us  has  been 
permitted  to  depict  to  his  utmost  power  a  Man. 
We  must  drape  him  and  give  him  a  certain 
conventional  simper.  Society  will  not  tolerate 
the  Natural  in  our  Art."  If  Thackery  felt  that, 
why  did  he  not  take  his  reputation  and  his  for- 
tune in  his  hands  and,  defying  the  social  restric- 
tions which  he  deplored,  paint  us  a  true  potrait 
of  a  young  gentleman  of  his  time?  He  might 
have  done  much  for  English  art  and  English 
honesty.  As  it  was,  he  did  as  much  as  any  writer 
of  his  generation  to  fasten  on  English  fiction  the 
fetters  of  a  hypocritical  reticence.  It  was  only  in 
the  last  generation  that  English  and  Irish  novel- 
ists, under  the  influence  of  French  literature, 
freed  themselves  from  the  cowardice  of  Victor- 
ian fiction  and  assumed  that  anything  human 
under  the  sun  is  proper  subject-matter  for  art. 
If  they  have  not  produced  masterpieces  (and  I 
do  not  admit  that  they  have  not) ,  they  have  made 
a  brave  beginning.  Such  a  book  as  "A  Portrait 
of  the  Artist  as  a  Young  Man"  would  have  been 

317 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

impossible  forty  years  ago.  Far  from  looking 
back  with  regret  at  the  good  old  novelists  of  the 
nineteenth  century  (whom,  besides,  we  need 
never  lose),  I  believe  that  our  fiction  is  in  some 
respects  freer*  and  richer  than  the  fiction  of  our 
immediate  forefathers. 

Joyce's  work  is  outspoken,  vigorous,  original, 
beautiful.  Whether  it  faithfully  reflects  Irish 
politics  and  the  emotional  conflicts  of  the  Catho- 
lic religion  one  who  is  neither  Irish  nor  Catholic 
can  not  judge  with  certainty.  It  seems,  however, 
that  the  noisy  controversies  over  Parnell  and 
the  priests  in  which  the  boy's  elders  indulge  have 
the  sound  of  living  Irish  voices;  and  the  dis- 
tracted boy's  wrestlings  with  his  sins  and  his  faith 
are  so  movingly  human  that  they  hold  the  sym- 
pathy even  of  one  who  is  indifferent  to  the  re- 
ligious arguments.  I  am  afraid  that  the  re- 
ligious questions  and  the  political  questions  are 
too  roughly  handled  to  please  the  incurably  de- 
vout and  patriotic.  If  they  ever  put  up  a  statue 
of  Joyce  in  Dublin,  it  will  not  be  during  his  life- 
time. For  he  is  no  respecter  of  anything  except 
art  and  human  nature  and  language. 

There  are  some  who,  to  turn  his  own  imagina- 
tive phrase,  will  fret  in  the  shadow  of  his  lan- 
guage.   He  makes  boys  talk  as  boys  do,  as  they 

*If  it  gets  too  free,  as  in  Jo5^ce's  "Ulysses,"  it  has  an  official 
hand  clapped  on  its  mouth ! 

318 


JAMES  JOYCE 

did  in  your  school  and  mine,  except  that  we 
lacked  the  Irish  imagery  and  whimsicality.  If 
the  young  hero  is  abnormal  and  precocious,  that 
is  because  he  is  not  an  ordinary  boy  but  an  ar- 
tist, gifted  with  thoughts  and  phrases  above  our 
common  abilities.  This  is  a  portrait  of  an  ar- 
tist, a  literary  artist  of  the  finest  quality. 

The  style  is  a  joy.  "Cranly's  speech,"  he 
writes,  "had  neither  rare  phrases  of  Elizabethan 
English  nor  quaintly  turned  versions  of  Irish 
idioms."  In  that  Joyce  has  defined  his  own  style. 
It  is  Elizabethan,  yet  thoroughly  modern;  it  is 
racily  Irish,  yet  universal  English.  It  is  un- 
blushingly  plain-spoken  and  richly  fanciful,  like 
Shakespeare  and  Ben  Jonson.  The  effect  of  com- 
plete possession  of  the  traditional  resources  of 
language  is  combined  with  an  effect  of  complete 
indifference  to  traditional  methods  of  fiction. 
Episodes,  sensations,  dreams,  emotions  trivial 
and  tragic  succeed  each  other  neither  coherently 
nor  incoherently;  each  is  developed  vividly  for 
a  moment,  then  fades  away  into  the  next,  with 
or  without  the  mechanical  devices  of  chapter 
divisions  or  rows  of  stars.  Life  is  so;  a  fellow 
is  pandied  by  the  schoolmaster  for  no  offense; 
the  cricket  bats  strike  the  balls,  pick,  pock,  puck; 
there  is  a  girl  to  dream  about;  and  Byron  was  a 
greater  poet  than  Tennyson  anyhow.  .  .  . 

The  sufferings  of  the  poor  little  sinner  are  told 
319 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

with  perfect  fidelity  to  his  point  of  view.  Since 
he  is  an  artist  his  thoughts  appropriately  find 
expression  in  phrases  of  maturer  beauty  than  the 
speech  of  ordinary  boys.  He  is  enamored  of 
words,  intrigued  by  their  mystery  and  color; 
wherefore  the  biographer  plays  through  the 
boy's  thoughts  with  all  manner  of  verbal  loveli- 
ness. 

Did  he  then  love  the  rhythmic  rise  and  fall  of  words  better 
than  their  associations  of  legend  and  colour?  Or  was  it  that,  be- 
ing as  weak  of  sight  as  he  was  shy  of  mind,  he  drew  less 
pleasure  from  the  reflection  of  the  glowing  sensible  world  through 
the  prism  of  a  langiiage  many-coloured  and  richly  storied  than 
from  the  contemplajtion  of  an  inner  world  of  individual  emotions 
mirrored  perfectly  in  a  lucid  supple  periodic  prose? 

From  the  fading  splendor  of  an  evening  beau- 
tifully described,  he  tumbles  into  the  sordid  day 
of  a  house  rich  in  pawn  tickets.  That  is  life. 
"Welcome,  O  life!"  he  bids  farewell  to  his  young 
manhood.  "I  go  to  encounter  for  the  millionth 
time  the  reality  of  experience  and  to  forge  in  the 
smithy  of  my  soul  the  uncreated  conscience  of 
my  race.  Old  father,  old  artificer,  stand  me  now 
and  ever  in  good  stead." 

The  sketches  in  "Dubliners"  are  perfect,  each 
in  its  own  way,  and  all  in  one  way:  they  imply 
a  vast  deal  that  is  not  said.  They  are  small  as 
the  eye-glass  of  a  telescope  is  small;  you  look 
through  them  to  depths  and  distances.  They  are 
a  kind  of  short  story  almost  unknown  to  the 
American   magazine   if   not   to   the   American 

320 


JAMES  JOYCE 

writer.  An  American  editor  might  read  them 
for  his  private  pleasure,  but  from  his  profes- 
sional point  of  view  he  would  not  see  that  there 
was  any  story  there  at  all.  The  American  short 
story  is  explicit  and  thin  as  a  moving-picture 
film ;  it  takes  nothing  for  granted ;  it  knows  noth- 
ing of  the  art  of  the  hintful,  the  suggestive,  the 
selected  single  detail  which  lodges  fertilely  in 
the  reader's  mind,  begetting  ideas  and  emotions. 
America  is  not  the  only  offender  (for  patriotism 
is  the  fashion  and  bids  criticism  relent)  ;  there  is 
much  professional  Irish  humor  which  is  funny 
enough  but  no  more  subtle  than  a  shillalah.  And 
English  short  stories,  such  at  least  as  we  see  in 
magazines,  are  obvious  and  "express"  rather 
than  expressive.  Joyce's  power  to  disentangle 
a  single  thread  from  the  confusion  of  life  and 
let  you  run  briefly  back  upon  it  until  you  en- 
counter the  confusion  and  are  left  to  think  about 
it  yourself — that  is  a  power  rare  enough  in  any 
literature. 

Except  one  story,  "A  Painful  Case,"  I  could 
not  tell  the  plot  of  any  of  these  sketches.  Be- 
cause there  is  no  plot  going  from  beginning  to 
end.  The  plot  goes  from  the  surface  inward, 
from  a  near  view  away  into  a  background.  A 
person  appears  for  a  moment — a  priest,  or  a  girl, 
or  a  small  boy,  or  a  street-corner  tough,  or  a 
drunken  salesman — and  does  and  says  things  not 

321 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

extraordinary  in  tliemselves ;  and  somehow  you 
know  all  about  these  people  and  feel  that  you 
could  think  out  their  entire  lives.  Some  are 
stupid,  some  are  pathetic,  some  are  funny  in  an 
unhilarious  way.  The  dominant  mood  is  irony. 
The  last  story  in  the  book,  "The  Dead,"  is  a 
masterpiece  which  will  never  be  popular,  be- 
cause it  is  all  about  living  people;  there  is  only 
one  dead  person  in  it  and  he  is  not  mentioned 
until  near  the  end.  That's  the  kind  of  trick  an 
Irishman  like  Synge  or  Joyce  would  play  on  us^ 
and  perhaps  a  Frenchman  or  a  Russian  would 
do  it;  but  we  would  not  stand  it  from  one  of  our 
own  writers. 


."^22 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE. 

Mr.  Lawrence  is  a  poet  in  prose  and  in  verse. 
No  writer  of  his  generation  is  more  singular, 
more  unmistakably  individual,  and  no  other  that 
I  know  is  endowed  with  his  great  variety  of 
gifts.  He  is  as  dangerous  to  public  morals  as 
Meredith  or  Hardy.  Readers  who  cannot  under- 
stand the  tragedy  of  "Richard  Feverel"  o*-  of 
"Jude  the  Obscure,"  will  not  understand  Mr. 
Lawrence  or  be  interested  to  read  a  third  of  the 
way  through  one  of  his  books.  The  stupidity 
of  the  multitude  is  sure  protection  against  his 
insidious  loveliness  and  essential  sadness.  He 
and  his  admirers  will,  I  hope,  regard  it  as  hon- 
orable to  him  that  he  reminds  this  critic  oftener 
of  Meredith  and  Hardy  than  of  any  of  his  con- 
temporaries. I  am  not  so  fatuous  as  to  suggest 
that  his  independent  and  original  work  is  in  any 
unfavorable  sense  derivative.  It  must  be  true 
that  every  young  novelist  learns  his  lessons  from 
the  older  novelists;  but  I  cannot  see  that  Mr. 
Lawrence  is  clearly  the  disciple  of  any  one 
master.  I  do  feel  simply  that  he  is  of  the  elder 
stature  of  Meredith  and  Hardy,  and  I  will  sug- 
gest, in  praise  of  him,  some  resemblances  that 

325 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

have  struck  me,  without  trying  to  analyze  or 
quote  chapter  and  verse  in  tedious  parallels. 

Mr.  Lavs^rence  is  a  lyric  as  w^ell  as  a  tragic 
poet.  In  this  he  is  like  Meredith  and  Hardy, 
and  I  can  think  of  no  other  young  novelist  who 
is  quite  worthy  of  the  company.  Young  people 
in  love,  or  some  other  difficulty,  become  en- 
tangled with  stars  and  mountains  and  seas ;  they 
are  baffled  and  lost,  seldom  consoled,  in  cosmic 
immensities.  Novelists  who  happen  also  to  be 
poets  are  enamoured  of  those  immensities. 

This  is  the  end  of  ''Sons  and  Lovers": 

"Where  was  he? — one  tiny  upright  speck  of 
flesh,  less  than  an  ear  of  wheat  lost  in  the  field. 
He  could  not  bear  it.  On  every  side  the  im- 
mense dark  silence  seemed  pressing  him,  so  tiny 
a  spark,  into  extinction,  and  yet,  almost  nothing, 
he  could  not  be  extinct.  Night,  in  which  every- 
thing was  lost,  went  reaching  out,  beyond  stars 
and  sun.  Stars  and  sun,  a  few  bright  grains, 
went  spinning  round  for  terror,  and  holding  each 
other  in  embrace,  there  in  the  darkness  that  out- 
passed  them  all,  and  left  them  tiny  and  daunted. 
So  much,  and  himself,  infinitesimal,  at  the  core 
nothingness,  and  yet  not  nothing." 

The  concluding  scenes  of  "Women  in  Love" 
are  the  Alps,  "a  silence  of  dim,  unrealized  snow, 
of  the  invisible  intervening  between  her  and  the 
visible,  between  her  and  the  flashing  stars."    I 

326 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 

am  reminded,  by  the  beauty  of  the  phrasing  and 
by  the  sense  of  the  pathetic  little  human  being 
adrift  in  space,  of  the  flight  of  the  two  young 
people  through  the  Alps,  in  "The  Amazing 
Marriage,"  and  of  farmer  Gabriel  Oak  watch- 
ing the  westward  flow  of  the  stars. 

Sometimes,  like  Meredith,  rather  than  like 
Hardy,  whose  style  is  colder  and  more  austere, 
Mr.  Lawrence  is  almost  too  lyric  and  his  phrases 
threaten  to  overflow  the  rigid  dikes  of  prose.  I 
could  pick  out  a  dozen  rhapsodical  passages 
which  with  little  change  might  well  appear  in 
his  books  of  verse. 

But  young  people  in  love  do  not  spend  all  their 
days  and  nights  in  ecstatic  flights  to  the  clouds. 
And  their  flights  are  followed  by  pathetic  Icar- 
ian  disasters.  From  luminous  moments  they 
plunge  into  what  Mr.  Lawrence  calls  "the  bitter- 
ness of  ecstacy,"  and  their  pain  outweighs  their 
joy  many  times  over,  as  in  Hardy,  and  as  in  the 
more  genial  Meredith,  whose  rapturous  digres- 
sion played  on  a  penny  whistle  is  a  cruelly  beau- 
tiful preparation  for  the  agonies  that  ensue.  It 
may  be  that  the  emotional  transports  of  Mr. 
Lawrence's  young  people  are  more  frequent  and 
violent  than  the  ordinary  human  soul  can  enjoy 
and  endure.  The  nervous  tension  is  high  and 
would  break  into  hysteria  if  Mr.  Lawrence  were 
not  a  philosopher  as  well  as  a  poet,  if  he  did  not 

327 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

know  so  accurately  what  goes  on  inside  the 
human  head,  if  he  had  not  an  artist's  ability  to 
keep  his  balance  at  the  very  moment  when  a  less 
certain  workman  would  lose  it. 

There  is  firm  ground  under  his  feet  and  under 
the  feet  of  his  lovers ;  it  is  the  everyday  life  which 
consists  of  keeping  shop  and  keeping  school  and 
other  commonplace  activities  in  street,  kitchen, 
and  coal  mine.  These  diurnal  details  he  studies 
with  a  fidelity  not  surpassed  by  Mr.  Bennett  or 
any  other  of  his  contemporaries.  The  talk  of 
his  people  is  always  alive,  both  the  dialect  of  the 
villagers  and  the  discussions  of  the  more  intellec- 
tual. Sometimes  he  puts  into  the  speech  of  his 
characters  a  little  more  of  his  own  poetic  fancy 
than  they  might  reasonably  be  supposed  to  be 
capable  of.  But  if  this  is  a  fault,  from  a  realistic 
point  of  view,  it  is  a  merit  from  the  point  of  view 
of  readability,  and  it  makes  for  vivacity.  At 
times — and  is  not  this  like  Meredith? — he  seems 
to  be  less  interested  in  the  sheer  dramatic  value 
of  a  situation  he  has  created  than  in  the  oppor- 
tunity it  offers  of  writing  beautiful  things  around 
it.  Not  that  his  situations  fail  to  carry  them- 
selves or  have  not  their  proper  place  and  propor- 
tion. Mr.  Lawrence  knows  how  to  handle  his 
narrative  and  he  has  an  abundant  invention  and 
dramatic  ingenuity.  But  he  is  above  those  ele- 
mentary   things    that    any    competent    novelist 

328 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 

knows.  He  has  the  something  else  that  makes 
the  story  teller  the  first  rate  literary  artist — style 
may  be  the  word  for  it,  but  poetic  imagination 
seems  to  be  the  better  and  more  inclusive  term. 
Open  "The  Lost  Girl"  at  page  57  and  read  two 
pages.  Without  knowing  what  has  preceded  or 
whither  the  story  is  bound,  anybody  who  knows 
what  literature  is  will  feel  at  once  that  that  is  it. 
"Women  in  Love"  is  a  sequel  to  "The  Rain- 
bow," in  that  it  carries  on  the  story  of  Ursula 
of  the  family  of  Brangwen.  "The  Rainbow" 
is  the  stronger  book;  it  has  more  of  the  tragic 
power,  the  deep  social  implications  of  Mr.  Law- 
rence's masterpiece,  "Sons  and  Lovers".  In 
"Women  in  Love"  are  four  young  people,  two 
men  and  two  women,  whose  chief  interest,  for 
them  and  for  us,  is  in  amatory  relations.  This 
is  indicated  by  the  title  of  the  story,  one  of  those 
obvious  titles  which  only  a  man  of  imagination 
could  hit  upon,  so  simple  that  you  wonder  why 
no  novelist  ever  thought  of  it  before.  Now  the 
erotic  relations  of  people,  though  a  tremendous 
part  of  life,  as  all  the  great  tragic  romances 
prove,  are  still  only  part  of  life.  Nobody  knows 
this  better  than  Mr.  Lawrence.  The  first  story 
of  the  Brangwen  family  is  richer  than  the  second, 
not  because  of  the  proverbial  falling  ofif  of  se- 
quels, not  because  Mr.  Lawrence's  power  de- 
clined— far  from  it! — but  because  the  first  novel 

329 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

embraces  a  larger  number  of  the  manifold  in- 
terests that  compose  the  fever  called  living.  In 
it  are  not  only  young  lovers,  but  old  people,  old 
failures,  the  land,  the  town,  the  succession  of  the 
generations  rooted  yet  restless.  Ursula  emerges 
from  immemorial  centuries  of  English  life, 
touched  with  foreign  blood  out  of  Poland  (when 
an  English  novelist  wishes  to  introduce  variety 
and  strangeness  into  the  dull  solidity  of  an  Eng- 
lish town  he  imports  a  Pole,  or  an  Italian,  or  a 
Frenchman,  somebody  not  English). 

Ursula's  background  is  thus  richer  than  all 
her  emotional  experience.  Her  father,  her 
grandfather,  the  family,  the  muddled  tragi- 
comedy of  little  affairs  and  ambitions,  the  grim, 
gray  colliery  district,  the  entire  social  situation, 
are  the  foundations  and  walls  of  the  story,  and 
she  is  the  slender  spire  that  surmounts  it  all — 
and  is  struck  by  lightning.  In  "The  Rainbow" 
she  goes  to  ashes,  and  in  "Women  in  Love"  she 
revives,  burns  again,  and  finds  in  her  new  love 
new  dissatisfaction. 

It  is  impossible  to  write  of  Mr.  Lawrence 
without  discoursing  in  symbols  and  reflecting, 
somewhat  pallidly,  his  metaphors.  For  like  all 
genuine  poets  he  is  a  symbolist.  In  "Aaron's 
Rod"  he  redoubles  and  compounds  symbolism  in 
a  manner  baffling  to  readers  and  to  critics  who 
like  to  have  their  prose  prosaic  and  their  poetry 

330 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 

in  lines  and  whose  sound  stomachs  refuse  a  mixed 
drink.  I  enjoy  the  mixture — in  the  Bible,  in 
Meredith,  in  Ruskin,  in  James,  in  Lawrence. 

It  is  stupid  to  explain  symbols.  Yet  after  all 
that  is  the  dull  function  of  criticism,  to  explain 
something — as  if  the  creator  of  a  work  of  art 
had  not  given  all  the  necessary  explanation  in 
the  very  act  of  creation.  Whoever  does  not 
understand  Lawrence  on  immediate  contact  will 
not  understand  him  better  after  the  intervention 
of  a  critic.  But  it  is  the  pleasure  and  the  privi- 
lege of  a  critic  to  have  his  secondary  imagina- 
tion set  on  fire  by  the  primary  imagination  of  a 
man  of  genius,  to  spread  the  fire  if  he  can  by 
the  cold  fluid  of  critical  exposition — as  water 
carries  burning  oil. 

Well,  then,  Aaron's  rod  is  doubly  symbolic. 
His  rod  which,  in  the  Biblical  phrase,  bloomed, 
blossomed  and  yielded  almonds,  is  a  flute.  And 
the  symbol  is  also  phallic,  as,  indeed,  it  is  in  the 
Bible.  Aaron's  flute,  the  musical  instrument,  is 
smashed  in  an  accident  which  is  as  irrational 
as  life  itself.  The  instrument  in  its  other  aspect 
is  broken  by  the  supreme  and  only  rationality 
— that  of  human  character. 

>  In  all  his  books,  beginning  with  "Sons  and 
Lovers,"  Mr.  Lawrence  has  shown  relatively 
little  interest  in  those  mere  sequences  of  external 
events  which  novelists  artificially  pattern  into 

331 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

plots.  He  throws  some  matter-of-fact  probabili- 
ties to  the  winds,  as  in  "Aaron's  Rod,"  when  he 
makes  a  man  from  the  English  colleries  a  master 
flautist  and  alleges  that  he  got  a  hearing  in  Italy, 
where  there  are  more  good  flautists  to  the  square 
inch  than  in  England  to  the  square  mile. 

But  Aaron  is  an  unusual  person.  "It  is  re- 
markable," says  his  creator,  "how  many  odd  or 
extraordinary  people  there  are  in  England." 
Mr.  Lawrence  has  always  been  interested  in 
slightly  eccentric  characters,  and  so  he  stands 
apart  from  his  contemporaries  who  call  them- 
selves realists  or  naturalists  because  they  deal 
with  the  commonplace  or  the  recognizably  nor- 
mal. 

After  all,  extraordinary  persons  in  fiction,  as 
in  life,  are  better  worth  knowing  than  ordinary 
persons.  Mr.  Lawrence  does  not  make  his 
people  so  widely  different  from  the  general  run 
of  human  beings  as  to  put  a  strain  on  credulity, 
and  he  studies  them  with  a  subtle  and  firm  under- 
standing. Their  talk  sounds  real.  Their  emo- 
tions are  alive  in  his  bold  and  delicate  prose. 
He  has  made  amateurish  excursions  into  psycho- 
analysis, which  may  or  may  not  be  a  fruitful  sub- 
ject for  a  novelist  to  study.  The  real  novelist 
has  always  been  a  psychologist  in  an  untechnical 
sense. 

Mr.  Lawrence  is  too  fine  an  artist  to  import 
332 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 

into  his  art  the  dubious  lingo  of  psycho-analysis; 
he  remains  the  poet,  the  dramatist,  his  symbols 
and  images  uncorrupted  by  pseudo-science. 
Aaron's  dream  in  the  last  chapter — no  modern 
novel  is  complete  without  at  least  one  dream — 
is  easily  "freuded"  (cave,  corridor,  and  w^ater 
symbols),  but  Mr.  Lawrence  refrains  from 
analysis. 

Aaron's  whole  life,  or  as  much  as  the  author 
gives  us  of  it,  is  a  dream,  a  dream  unfulfilled  in 
love  or  friendship  or  music.  To  what  he  wakes, 
if  he  wakes  at  all,  the  conclusion  leaves  us  guess- 
ing. That  will  puzzle  readers  who  demand  that 
a  story  shall  finish  with  a  bang  or  come  to  a 
definite  point  of  rest.  But  life  does  not  con- 
clude; it  persists. 

When  Aaron  related  his  history  and  experi- 
ences to  some  friends,  he  "told  all  his  tale  as  if 
it  was  a  comedy.  A  comedy  it  seemed,  too,  at 
that  hour.  And  a  comedy  no  doubt  it  was.  But 
mixed,  like  most  things  in  this  life.  Mixed." 
Though  Aaron  is  a  strange  man,  an  individual, 
yet  the  conflict  that  goes  on  in  him,  between  his 
rebellion  and  his  indecision,  his  desire  and  his 
impotence,  is  not  freakish;  it  is  so  much  like  the 
struggle  that  every  man  knows,  with  special  var- 
iations, that  it  is  true  to  universal  human  nature. 
Behind  the  symbolism  are  the  plain  facts,  solidly 
conceived. 

333 


THE  CRITICAL  GAME 

The  other  characters  in  the  book  are  well 
drawn,  notably  Aaron's  odd,  philosophic  friend, 
Lilly,  whose  ideas  are  at  once  clear  and  cryptic. 
There  is  a  pitifully  accurate  portrait  of  a  cap- 
tain whose  soul  and  nerves  had  not  recovered 
from  the  war.  In  a  single  chapter  through  one 
man  Mr.  Lawrence  suggests  the  disillusionment, 
the  mental  disaster,  that  followed  the  armistice. 
"None  of  the  glamour  of  returned  heroes,  none 
of  the  romance  of  war  .  .  .  the  hot,  seared  burn 
of  unbearable  experience,  which  did  not  heal 
nor  cool,  and  whose  irritation  was  not  to  be  re- 
lieved." 

In  "The  Lost  Girl"  and  "Women  in  Love" 
the  men  are  subordinate  to  the  women.  In 
"Aaron's  Rod"  the  women  are  of  secondary  in- 
terest; Aaron's  wife  is  rather  indistinct  and 
shadow^^,  and  the  Marchesa,  the  Cleopatra  whom 
he  tried  to  love  and  couldn't,  never  quite  comes 
alive,  either  for  Aaron  or  for  the  reader.  Prob- 
ably these  women  are  just  what  Mr.  Lawrence 
intended  them  to  be,  as  seen  through  Aaron's 
temperament.  But  I  do  not  feel  that  Mr.  Law- 
rence has  here  made  a  very  striking  contribution 
to  the  history  of  the  everlasting  warfare  between 
the  sexes.  Did  Aaron  miss  because  he  happened 
not  to  meet  the  right  woman?  Or  was  he  the 
sort  of  man  whom  no  woman  could  capture  and 
satisfy?     Evidently   Mr.    Lawrence   means    to 

334 


D.  H.  LAWRENCE 

leave  the  eternal  question  unsettled  even  for  the 
man  whom  he  has  created. 

Like  many  other  English  poets,  Mr.  Lav^rence 
is  a  lover  of  Italy,  and  he  takes  his  hero  there, 
one  suspects,  for  the  sheer  joy  of  the  scene  and 
the  atmosphere,  which  he  realizes  with  vivid 
beauty.  He  is  a  master  of  description,  a  master 
of  words.  His  command  ranges  from  the  bald- 
est sort  of  every  day  conversation  to  prose  har- 
monies that  are  as  near  to  verse  as  prose  can  go 
without  breaking  over.  This  is  not  merely  a 
command  of  style;  it  is  more  than  that — it  is  a 
command  of  ideas.  Mr.  Lawrence  can  pass  with 
equal  sureness  from  colliery  to  cathedral  and 
find  the  right  word  for  every  thing  and  person 
met  on  the  way,  the  right  word,  though  often  a 
perplexed  and  perplexing  word.  Because  life  is 
like  that.  It  is  "mixed." 


33? 


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